Written by a NASA scientist, this is the first book specifically aimed at teaching the reader how to interpret the colour-coded maps produced from raw satellite data. The author identifies six major environmental topics - atmospheric ozone, polar sea ice, continental snow cover, sea surface temperatures, land vegetation and volcanoe - for which radiative data collected by satellites is providing new global information. By learning to read the illustrative examples, the reader should become capable of reading and understanding all well-labelled, colour-coded satellite images.