NOAA radar overlaid on a part of NASA's Blue Marble image of the southeast US.

NOAA radar overlaid on a part of NASA's Blue Marble image of the southeast US.

The gdal set of GIS utilities is nothing new, and they are even incorporated into other GIS programs. But that does not mean that everyone who will ever need to master them has already done so, and it does not mean that mastering them is simple.  It’s not really difficult to start using utlities like gdalwarp directly, but there are details that keep it from being really simple. This article is part of my notes to myself as I try to learn some of this.

I wrote an article about using gdalwarp to perform a pair of standard projections from a rectilinear view of the Earth using a Blue Marble image from NASA’s Earth Observatory. Below I discuss using a custom projection to do something marginally useful — combining the Blue Marble with some NOAA weather imagery.

Below are the steps that went into making that image.  Note that I work in Linux, but Windows and likely Mac versions of these tools exist.

Read the rest of this entry »

A video with sound is superior to one without, whether it’s music that fits the mood, or background sound that fits the subject, such as wind or storm noise for a weather-related video. But a series of still images that make up a time-lapse animation does not come with any sound. Here are a couple of sources for sounds that are licensed under a variety of mashup-friendly licenses. Read the rest of this entry »

So I got around to converting this little site from hand-coded HTML into a CMS-managed blog.  This should make it much easier to add to from time to time. See the about page if you’re inexplicably curious about the idea here.