A compression tool for satellite based imagery of the earth's land and atmosphere is presented. Orthogonal wavelet filters are adopted for this purpose. The ability of the technique to compress images has been applied to AVHRR images of cloud fields and the earth's surface. Compression by a factor as large as 50 is possible in clear sky condition without any significant loss of information, whereas for frontal cloud fields, which are the most interesting in terms of meteorological studies, factors of ten are easily achieved
