Daily Loop:
CIRA Satellite Library -
GOES-E/W Loop of the day
* Imagery may not be updated over weekends or holidays.
Low Moves Down the West Coast
A low-pressure system moves down the West Coast, bringing stormy weather to California and snow to the Sierras.
Communications
Celebrating 45 years of CSU’s Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere
Featured PostAuthor: Theresa Barosh - September 26th, 2025
On Sept. 12, 1980, the president of Colorado State University signed the cooperative agreement with NOAA that resulted in the Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA). Now, 45 years later, CIRA is recognized as an authority in weather satellite data.
RAMMB SLIDER
SLIDER Satellites
Our Mission
The Cooperative Institute for Research in the Atmosphere (CIRA) serves as a nexus for multi-disciplinary cooperation between NOAA research scientists and Colorado State University research staff, faculty, and students, aligning NOAA-identified research theme areas with long-standing academic strengths of the University.
Our mission is: to foster additional collaboration with national and international agencies who are developing related capabilities; to affect the fundamental research conducted at the University towards NOAA’s operational needs; and to communicate our research and its practical implications to the scientific community and the public.
To this end, we are dedicated to providing high-quality training to ensure operational user proficiency; conducting outreach programs to K-12 education and the general public to promote environmental literacy; and to quantifying and communicating the significant positive societal impacts of NOAA research on our everyday lives.
Our Technology
With NOAA and CSU support CIRA has operated a Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite (GOES) Earth Station since 1980. Today our collection capability handles multiple simultaneous GOES transmissions, NOAA polar data, Himawari-8 and European MSG. CIRA also plays an important role in each new GOES satellite as one of the primary test sites for initial transmissions and sensor verification.
CIRA operates a high-technology infrastructure to support research in our major theme areas. The infrastructure contains over 300 workstations/servers, a satellite Earth Station with an online archive, several high-performance modelling clusters, and a high-speed network. With its expertise in data fusion, CIRA is developing systems and tools that will simplify the acquisition and manipulation of satellite and model data for scientific research.