For anyone who is interested in just getting satellite imagery (though I understand the fun of pulling it out of the air), NOAA makes the GOES imagery available online from static web addresses.
If you go to the base directories you can hunt around for different resolutions or for all kinds of other products, like full-disk images or even the lightning mapper.
I used to have a script that pulled the CONUS and FD (Full Disk) shots every 10 minutes. The goal was to auto-update my desktop wallpaper to the most recent imagery, but that proved to be frustratingly annoying to implement. Still, it was very cool to have an entire years worth of imagery at 10 minute intervals when I left it abandoned and it just kept running.
It provides a nice API to download many satellite images in bulk: optical, radar, multispectral and hyperspectral images of various types are available for free. That's about one TB of Earth images acquired per hour, and all of them are archived for ever and for all to see.
Do you still have the image archive? I started collecting them at New Years with a script (Goes x 2, Himiwari-8, EU Metsat) and would love to be able to get older imagery. I'm more than happy to pay for any bandwidth costs, etc if you can share the archive.
I appreciate the response, this is good to know. I apologize for not being clearer but what I'm specifically looking for is the "GeoColor" full-disk imagery [0], which I don't think is archived anywhere (beyond a couple weeks worth). That imagery is generated from the raw data you linked, but sadly the code isn't publicly available.
There is a good amount of material around the techniques used to generate the GeoColor images [1][2] but understanding it well enough to implement it is a little above me.
If any HN'er can code up something like this, I'd definitely be interested in talking with them.
Do you have any kind of "geospatial spreadsheet" processing software to take in raw sat datasets and an algorithm for combining bands and applying filters to create an output?
Eg: the commercial ERDAS Imagine or other products?
I imagine it would - it seems to be a modern version evolved from ERMapper of the late 1980s | early 1990s that did exactly this kind of work.
ERMapper was a program that could pipe in many raw input multi channel data files from satellite | aircraft | other sources along with an "algorithm" file that described what to do.
One part of the task is to geo mosaic and merge data from seperate files together so that per output location there is an awareness of what cells are local to that output, the cell dimensions, type of data, channel, etc.
The algorithm part is to (say) combine data from channels 3, 7, and 9 using a particular filter and to adjust (say) for rayleigh scattering.
Such programs are geospatially aware spreadsheet programs that pipe in raw data an pipe out "cooked" or processed data.
When the GeoColor scientific papers you linked talk about the filtering operations they do on channel data they very likely are not "coding" in the sense of writing C code - but constructing "algorithms" by specifying which mathematics operations to perform on input channel data and writing that out in the algorithm file*.
* Which a pre existing program (perhaps ERDAS Imagine) reads and applies to it's input data, the raw captures from the satellites.
Yes, I wrote such things 35+ years ago, no I'm not in the field today and don't have a copy of ERDAS Imagine.
I'm not sure what the state of art for open source geomosaic software is these days - something like
I don't, unfortunately. It occurred to me that I wasn't doing anything with the almost terabyte of images and didn't even have any ideas of what I would do, so I deleted it.
with a fun little shell script, you can curl/wget your way into doing this automagically for you.* i did this with imagery for NASA images to create custom timelapse sequences of the sun from SOHO. they have a similar fixed folder structure for the frequency filters and image dimensions. it created an art exhibit that would keep the previous 24 hours of data current.
*beware, using wget will prove you are evilHacker in certain jurisdictions. /s
Messing around with SDR is a really fun little hobby. There's something very satisfying about picking up signals that are just floating around waiting to be seen.
I briefly tried writing an SDR tuner in JavaScript a while back but there was a bug somewhere between Chrome and my SDR dongle that meant it failed whenever you tried to tune to a different frequency. I might pick it back up and see if it's possible now.
I used the EUMETSAT data to build this service which provides 3-hourly cloud maps for the whole Earth, which are surprisingly difficult to find: https://github.com/matteason/live-cloud-maps
I was expecting the NASA link to be a somewhat usable experience but it's... perhaps not for someone who just wants a weather prediction. The map is blank unless you add some layers, and I just spent "too long" failing to find anything useful. There are layers with data from 1987. maybe I need to use this on a desktop browser.
I remember seeing your page somewhere, but it got lost between all the opened tabs and I didn't bookmark it. Now that I've rediscovered it, and found the creator, I can say thanks mate :-)
WEfax is still useful and it's fun to experiment with different data modes. You don't need an expensive radio or even an SDR to receive it, any cheap used SW receiver will do.
I already have an rtl-sdr picking up aircraft beacons and have this antenna on my todo list. Are there any benefits to buying a grid antenna vs DIYing my own helix?
I tried that project and couldn't pick anything up. When the satellite was passing overhead, the antenna just couldn't pick up the signal. I have coworkers that got it to work, so I think either I configured the wiring on the antenna incorrectly (the directions weren't very clear to me), used the wrong type of coax, or my soldering was too sloppy (or a combination of A, B and C).
I'd love to see more demos on how to make the QFH antenna.
For EU people, this is a US geostationary satellite so no luck there, We have meteosat but its encrypted and have to pay a fee to use :( , even the russian (non geostationary meteor series) can be accessed freely.
GOES sats are geostationary but the NOAA APT satellites are encircling the planet and you can pick them up. Old tutorial but still relevant, just use "noaa-apt" tool[0] instead of WXtoImg. https://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weat...
Yeah, I've done it, built my own antenna and the whole receiving, the Meteor-M2 was in the same wavelength range and could be received but got hit my a meteorite January of last year
https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES16/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2... This link will always be the most recent shot of the continental US from GOES-16 (which is currently GOES-EAST)
https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES18/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2... This link will always be the most recent shot of the Pacific and West Coast US from GOES-17 (which is currently GOES-WEST)
If you go to the base directories you can hunt around for different resolutions or for all kinds of other products, like full-disk images or even the lightning mapper.
I used to have a script that pulled the CONUS and FD (Full Disk) shots every 10 minutes. The goal was to auto-update my desktop wallpaper to the most recent imagery, but that proved to be frustratingly annoying to implement. Still, it was very cool to have an entire years worth of imagery at 10 minute intervals when I left it abandoned and it just kept running.