Comment by dabluecaboose | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dabluecaboose | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

> For anyone who is interested in just getting satellite imagery (though I understand the fun of pulling it out of the air)

If you download satellite images from the internet, but you are connected via wifi, you are still pulling them out of the air, aren't you?

Behold the amazing Copernicus program, paid for by all European citizens:

https://dataspace.copernicus.eu/

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.

I use the CSU's RAMMB SLIDER UI at https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/

Most commercial EO vendors have imagery sets freely available.

https://www.maxar.com/open-data

https://www.capellaspace.com/gallery/

You need to apply for a key here: https://developers.planet.com/open/

AWS Hosts Earth Observation data here:

https://registry.opendata.aws/?search=tags:gis,earth%20obser...

Also, Microsofts Plantary Computer has a bunch of open data as well.

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.

Google Cloud and AWS host the netcdf GOES archives among others. They are all there.

https://console.cloud.google.com/marketplace/product/noaa-pu...

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.

[0] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/fulldisk_band.php?sat=... [1] https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/documents/QuickGuide_C... [2] https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atot/37/3/JTECH-D...

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 do not, no. Would that help?

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

https://github.com/sshuair/awesome-gis

might help to wind your way into the right kinds of geopspatial forums to discuss further, get references, etc.

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.

No worries. It is indeed tons of data. I've already stored 200GB+ and I just started on Jan 1st.

Is it possible to build a smooth hires animation of these? How often are the images updated?

Every ~10 minutes. It looks pretty smooth.

NOAA/NESDIS actually has animations posted on their website: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/conus_band.php?sat=G16...

Too bad there's no way to hide the ugly pixelated state/country borders to just see the beautiful raw photography.

The Full-Disk images don't have the baked-in borders:

https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/goes/fulldisk_band.php?sat=...

https://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/ has a UI for this

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

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