[GCARC] Follow the hurricane on the Skunkworks GOES videos

[Jon Pearce]

One of the Skunkworks’ Clubhouse projects has been to build a receiving and image processing station for the GOES 16 geostationary weather satellite that appears in the sky due south of the Clubhouse at 45 degrees elevation. That station receives the 1691 mhz signals continually, decoding the individual images and processing some of them into videos. The videos take individual high-resolution images (there are 48/day of many of them), combines them into a single video and then interpolates between the images to create smooth transitions between adjoining images. The result is a 6-day moving video of western hemisphere weather from space. There are several different sets of images sent by GOES16, some showing visible light, some interpreting infrared light, some relayed from the GOES17 satellite located over the Pacific Ocean and one set of images that are zoomed into the eastern US.

This stuff is pretty cool to look at but especially interesting during a major weather event like the hurricane that’s moving through the Caribbean and into Florida. The Longwave Infrared video at this link (http://clubhouse.w2mmd.org/GOES/video/fd_ch15_enhanced_20.mp4) clearly shows the red hotspot moving north, while the visual light video (http://clubhouse.w2mmd.org/GOES/video/fd_ch13_20.mp4) shows the clouds moving across the land masses. The east coast video (http://clubhouse.w2mmd.org/GOES/video/localarea.mp4) shows the hurricane moving across Cuba into Florida.  The dates and times of the individual images are shown in the filename displayed on the bottom of the screen.

Check them out if you’re interested and let me know what you think. You can see all of the images on the main GOES page here (https://wp.w2mmd.org/wp/goes-16-picture-of-the-day/) and feel free to peruse some of the other stuff on the Skunkworks site at skunkworks.w2mmd.org .

73 de Jon WB2MNF