EGB13

This animation shows the progression of weather for the 48 contiguous U.S. states for 2010.  The two insets on the right are both infrared satellite images; the top colorful one is a NOAA-enhanced version of the “plain” monochrome version below it.  Details of the infrared satellite images were previously discussed here.  The large radar animation is created from the “raw” radar-only images to which a noise-reduction process is applied before overlaying on a Blue Marble image of the U.S.  The results are projected in the same equal-area projection used by the National Atlas of the United States.

This was made from images that are captured regularly and automatically by a couple of different computers.  There are probably some gaps when my Internet connection was down.  The infrared images pause for a significant part of June while the radar continues because the computer that archives those images didn’t automatically get back on the network after rebooting while I was out of town for a week.  The computer processing the radar images came right back online, though.  Then in October there is some weird shuddering in the color-enhanced infrared image that seems to be from inconsistent updates of the source image by NOAA.  Overall, though, I’m pretty happy with it.  I do like the expanded area that the 16:9 aspect ratio gives me to work with.

To synchronize the anmiation of multiple images captured at different rates I used the radar images as a baseline.  Those are captured every 10 minutes, whereas the satellite images update less frequently.  A script was used to examine the timestamps of each radar image and then find the two satellite images with timestamps closest to that.  The frames fly by so quickly in order to compress a whole year down into 10 minutes, any asynchronicity is imperceptible (except for those episodes in June and October).

I don’t see these things proliferating around the internet, for some reason.  But if you do want to reuse any or all of this, note the differening licenses on the video and the two pieces of music used.  I made the video license match the first audio license for the sake of simplicity.  (I’d be happy to consider granting a more liberal license for the video only if someone actually wanted to reuse this in such a manner that required that.)