NASA world viewer

NASA’s Worldview is a web‑based visualisation tool offering interactive browsing, animation and download of over 1000 global satellite imagery layers, many available within three hours of observation. It supports time‑critical and historical analysis of natural hazards, climate phenomena and environmental change.

Please login or join for free to read more.

OVERVIEW

Organisation behind the tool
NASA’s Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS), under the Earth Observing System Data and Information System (EOSDIS), developed the Worldview tool.

What the tool does
Worldview is a web‑based visualisation platform that allows users to browse, animate, compare and download over 1,000–1,200 global satellite imagery products, many updated within hours of acquisition.

Users can view natural hazards (wildfires, floods, volcanic eruptions, storms), air quality, land cover, surface water and more via interactive maps, time‑series animation, overlays, charting, and embed features .

Target audience
Primary users include Earth scientists, researchers, decision‑makers and the general public.

Relevance to finance professionals
While not designed for finance, the tool offers valuable applications for economic and risk analysis:

Disaster risk modelling: Near‑real‑time imagery improves monitoring of wildfires, floods and storms—useful for assessing exposure and estimating economic losses.

Supply‑chain and agriculture analytics: Visualisation of crop conditions, water bodies, vegetation trends and drought enables anticipatory commodity risk and yield forecasting.

Environmental, social and governance (ESG): Air‑quality layers and environmental event tracking support ESG assessments and reporting.

Investment and market insights: Tracking environmental change and natural hazards can inform infrastructure, insurance and regional economic outlooks.

The charting function—currently in beta—enables time‑series visualisation (e.g. aerosol index trends), offering exploratory data analysis that may inform scenario building or preliminary trend assessment .

Summary
NASA’s ESDIS-developed Worldview is a web-based satellite imagery visualisation and data-download tool, offering interactive access to hundreds of time-sensitive global imagery layers. It primarily serves Earth scientists and decision-makers, yet offers practical value to finance professionals engaged in risk assessment, ESG, commodity analysis or disaster-related forecasting.