General information
AccuWeather's Global Satellite API delivers worldwide satellite overlay tiles and static satellite map images — past and current cloud and atmospheric imagery rendered as PNG tiles for layering onto an existing map, plus complete static images with legends ready for embedding.
→ See the Satellite Guide and Parameters for endpoint details and request patterns.
What you can request
- Overlay tiles — square PNG tiles designed to layer onto a Mercator-projection map service (Google Maps, Mapbox, Leaflet, Bing Maps). Tiles are returned one at a time.
- Static maps — complete weather map images (PNG or JPG) with built-in color legends. Available in light or dark mode, perfect for thumbnails, social cards, or fixed-size dashboards.
The Global Satellite API does not provide base map imagery. Overlay tiles are designed to display on top of a map service of your choice.
Products
Different regions of the world use different satellites with different update intervals. Without coordination, that inconsistency would cause some regions to appear to "jump" while others move smoothly on a zoomed-out view.
To prevent that, Global Satellite groups regional data sources into products. When a viewport spans multiple regions, Global Satellite identifies the slowest-refreshing product and matches the others to its rate — producing a cohesive, gracefully-synchronized view of world weather.
Each product has a unique code in the form major-minor (two numbers separated by a dash). Both values are returned in any API response that identifies one or more products.
Frames
Some endpoints return a list of frames — each frame has a timestamp and defines one set of satellite tiles. The total time span varies by product. When a viewport spans multiple products, Global Satellite trims to the shortest time span, so all visible regions cover matching periods.
Normalized radar data
Global Satellite supports Normalized Radar Data (NRD) — a special mode that encodes precise temperature information into the red channel of the satellite imagery. When NRD is enabled, the red value of every pixel directly correlates to a temperature in Kelvin, enabling pixel-accurate temperature analysis.
| Red value | Kelvin (K) |
|---|---|
| 0 | No data |
| 1 | 180 |
| 254 | 308 |
Each increase of 1 in the red value corresponds to an increase of 0.5059 K. Convert any red value R to Kelvin using:
Code