This meteorological information is also available to anyone with a personal computer and relatively inexpensive hardware and software. Many of these satellites transmit signals directly to ground stations in schools, including the Frank H. Harrison Middle School in Yarmouth, Maine, and Wiscasset Primary School in Wiscasset, Maine. Of course, highly-trained technicians, like Georgie Thompson's third grade students, operate the controls of such a station. They are able to predict when the satellites will be overhead, when they can expect to receive an image, and they can loop together several images of cloud conditions and movements from different passes of the satellites to make reliable weather predictions.
Any school can establish such a ground station at a surprisingly low cost.
Both polar orbiting and geostationary weather satellites are available to the educational community. They have the capability to receive, measure, process, and retransmit data from balloons, buoys, and remote automatic stations distributed around the globe. At an altitude of 860 km. As each NOAA polar-orbiting satellite orbits the Earth, it constantly sends a stream of data. In a pass lasting 12 minutes, this translates into an image approximately 5800 km.