Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tombrossman | Hacker News Reader

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Do any European space agencies make live weather imagery available at high resolution? I'm looking for a direct link to JPEGs that update regularly, to use with a cron script to use as desktop wallpaper.

I can easily do this for North America using imagery here, for example: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus.php?sat=G16 (bonus, imagery is Public Domain).

This direct link provides an updated image every five minutes, with even higher resolution available if you like: https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...

Every time I revisit this idea and look for western Europe, I find nothing. Or, very low resolution, or some clunky, proprietary "viewer" forced on users. Is there really nothing similar for Europe?

You can receive a lot of weather satellites with self-build equipment utilizing the tool "SatDump". But: the good old times of 137MHz analog satellite pictures are over. We talking about digital high-rate X-Band stuff (~8GHz) that requires auto-tracked dishes here.

Sentiel-2 data can be pulled for free from the Copernicus service. It's a LEO sat and you often get a picture every 2 days of the same region.

DWD (German Meteo Service) offers a metric ton of data on their FTP Server as public data.

I use the Eumetsat FCI (Flexible Combined Imager) full disc images on board of geostationary satellite MTG centered at 0 degree longitude. A single image (distributed as netcdf file) is pretty large in fact much larger than my screen resolution. If you are interested, the Julia code for downloading and creating the PNG image is here:

https://codeberg.org/Alexander-Barth/FCI-MTG-0

While doing that, I learned that it is not so trivial to produce a true colour RGB image from these FCI [1]. I think there is also a WMS server for rendered images but I don't have the link on my phone.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1175/BAMS-D-15-00154.1

https://highsight.dev/ should work for that!

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