Abstract: Serial images obtained by meteorological satellite have both rigid and nonrigid deformations. Due to this characteristic, a hierarchical transformation model of the motion based on B-spline is introduced. The global rigid deformation of the image is mainly caused by the position changes of the sensor, and it includes rotation and shift. Cloud’s distortion results in the local nonrigid deformation. The global motion of the image is modeled by an affine transformation which carries out the rigid registration. While the local image deformation is described by an improved free-form deformation (FFD) model based on B-spline. The algorithm has been applied to the fully automated registration system of nephograms, and the results clearly indicate that the approach we proposed can not only achieve sub-pixel precision, but also decrease the runtime of the process.