NASA GIBS and Worldview

The Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS) are NASA's service for turning Earth observation data into ready-made map images.¹ GIBS is part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS).¹ It takes satellite data from NASA's data centres and science teams and renders each product as pictures at the native resolution of its source.^1,4 These are stored as a tile pyramid, the same image cut into small squares at a series of zoom levels, which lets any part of the world be served quickly at any scale.¹ Worldview is NASA's browser application for exploring that imagery.⁵

The archive holds over 1,200 visualisations.⁴ Some are true-colour or false-colour pictures made by combining a satellite's spectral bands.⁴ Others colour a measured quantity on a scale, one colour per value or range, and some are vector layers.⁴ Utility layers add coastlines, graticules and water masks.⁴ Many are made by NASA's near real-time processing system, LANCE, and reach GIBS within 3.5 hours of the satellite passing; many products also run back to the start of their mission.⁴ Most imagery is updated daily, and some products span almost 30 years.² Each layer is indexed by date, so a client asks for a place and a day.³

GIBS serves its tiles through Open Geospatial Consortium standards, the common web protocols that GIS software and web map libraries speak: Web Map Tile Service (WMTS), Web Map Service (WMS), a tiled variant of WMS, and script access through the GDAL library.^2,3 The WMTS addresses can also be used as a plain XYZ tile URL in tools such as ArcGIS Online.³ Imagery comes in four projections: geographic latitude-longitude, Web Mercator, and Arctic and Antarctic polar stereographic.² Endpoints choose between near real-time, science-quality or best-available versions of each layer.³ Tiles are JPEG or PNG, and some layers are also available as vector tiles.⁴ The documented requests carry no key or login.³ A sample tile request on 30 October 2026 returned an image whose headers let any web page load it.⁷

Worldview lets a user browse, compare, animate and download the GIBS layers on a computer or phone, and can be embedded in other sites.⁵ Its Events tab lists current wildfires, tropical storms, volcanic eruptions and other natural events.⁵ Geostationary layers come every ten minutes for the last 90 days.⁵ Worldview Snapshots is a lighter tool for downloading georeferenced images of an area with overlays of active fires, coastlines, borders and roads, meant for slow connections or for fetching the same area every day.⁵ Worldview is built on OpenLayers, and its code is on GitHub under the NASA Open Source Agreement 1.3; NASA encourages developers to build their own clients on GIBS, with Cesium, Leaflet, Google Maps and GDAL among those it names.^5,6 GIBS itself runs on NASA's open-source OnEarth server and Meta Raster Format.¹

NASA promotes full and open sharing of the data and asks users of GIBS to acknowledge it with this line: "We acknowledge the use of imagery provided by services from NASA's Global Imagery Browse Services (GIBS), part of NASA's Earth Science Data and Information System (ESDIS)."¹

For someone modelling a place, GIBS shows what the place looked like from space on a given day, so a flood's extent, a smoke plume or a burn scar can be set beside a model's output. Because the tiles are images, not measurements, analysis that needs the underlying values goes back to the source data through NASA Earthdata; GIBS layers link to their source products in NASA's catalogue.⁴