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Question

Why can a geo-stationary satellite monitor the movement of clouds accurately?

This question was previously asked in
SSC CHSL 2025 Tier 1 Question Paper (21-Nov-2025) (Shift 1)
The correct answer is

Because it is stationary relative to any place on Earth.

The question asks why a geo-stationary satellite is especially well suited to continuously monitoring the movement of clouds over a fixed region.

A geo-stationary satellite is placed in a circular orbit lying in the equatorial plane at an altitude of about 36,000 km, a height at which its orbital period exactly equals Earth's rotation period of roughly 24 hours.

Because it revolves in the same direction as the Earth spins, that is from west to east, and at the same angular rate, it always remains poised above the same point on the surface.

As a result, to an observer standing on the ground the satellite appears permanently fixed at one spot in the sky, endlessly overlooking the same geographical area.

This unchanging, uninterrupted vantage lets its onboard cameras and sensors image the identical region again and again at short intervals, so slow developments such as the birth, growth and drift of cloud systems can be tracked frame by frame, which is exactly what weather and storm monitoring demand.

The options describing motion from north to south or south to north, or rotation faster than the Earth, are wrong because any such relative motion would make the satellite drift steadily across the sky, so it would lose sight of the region and could not keep a continuous watch on the same clouds.

Hence a geo-stationary satellite monitors clouds accurately because it is stationary relative to any place on Earth.

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