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EUMETSAT RSS
Rapid Scanning Service
Animations
For your interest and enjoyment, here is a movie made from the
EUMETSAT Rapid Scanning Service (RSS) which uses the standby Meteosat 6
satellite to provide northern hemisphere scans every ten minutes. Here the
image has been remapped to a polar stereographic projection, and the infra-red
channel used to make a false-colour image where the coldest cloud-tops are
black, sea is blue, and land green to yellow depending on temperature.
The animation covers just over one complete day, and is in
Windows AVI format, compressed down to 15MB. This has made the gridlines
rather peculiar, but the cloud movement is beautifully depicted.
- A 15MB animation is available - please request by e-mail)
Some of your questions answered....
- Why are the clouds black? It just happens to be the
colour palette I use and now prefer.
- Why use polar stereographic projection? The raw data
from the satellite provides a somewhat oblique view of the earth, but
reprojecting the data removes this oblique view. The projection is
widely used for meteorological applications.
- Why is there a black band at the top and bottom of the
picture? The imager does not scan the full height of the earth, and
cannot see the North Pole because of its location.
- Why does the black band move? The satellite actually
moves slightly in its orbit, and there is now not enough fuel left to
correct this.
- Why is there a gap at the top left of the picture?
The satellite is actually located at 10°E, so cannot see as far west as if
it were at 0°.
- How big was the original animation? The original 2.5
day animation was 650MB.
The Rapid Scanning Service was close in January 2007.
Ship Trails Animation
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Many thanks to Ton Lindemann for pointing out the value of
animating the ship trails in the following animation. This is a
false-colour animation from 2003-Jan-26 showing pronounced ship
trails
in the region just off the Bay of Biscay.
If you look at the animation carefully, you can see how
the trails are affected by the winds, and you can also see the movement of
some of the ships at the most narrow, pointed ends of the trails.
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More questions answered....
- What interval is the animation? Data is collected at
10 minute intervals, and has been interpolated between those intervals for a
smoother result.
- How big was the original animation? 94MB.
You may be interested in the high-resolution
images also broadcast over the EUMETCast service.
The animation was made from EUMETSAT
data (© 2002) by GeoSatSignal. |
Download
the zipped animation (2.5MB)