Image (normally) courtesy of the Meteorological Service of the Netherlands Antilles and Aruba. The satellite reception equipment will continue to be out of service until further notice. Images from other sources will be placed here until the usual image reception at this office is resumed, which is probably somewhere later in 2010.
This picture was taken by the Aqua polar orbital satellite from a height of about 680 kilometers on Saturday, January 23, 2010 at 11:20 A.M. local time (15:20 UTC). Image courtesy of MODIS Rapid Response Project at NASA/GSFC.
On this late Saturday morning, a few areas with patchy cloudiness can be seen near and over parts of the ABC Islands. Especially east and southeast of Curaçao and also south of Bonaire, these (mainly stratocumulus type) clouds are quite close to each other. These clouds are typical for this time of the year and are usually too shallow to produce any rain.
A few areas of these same type of clouds can also be observed over the eastern part of the Paraguaná peninsula in Venezuela and near the low right corner of this image as well. Much of the remainder of this image over Venezuela is free of clouds and a good part of this image still displays the Venezuelan teritory with a rather brown appearance. This clearly indicates that the vegetation in these regions, just like on our island, is suffering of a lack of rain.
To see not so detailed but still very useful up-to-date pictures of the Caribbean and other parts of the Earth, see the Weather Satellite page presented by the author of this page.