Here is an animation of US radar and GOES satellite images for all of 2011. There is a progress bar at the bottom of the animation with certain notable events highlighed. When the video reaches those points, the name of the event is shown right above the bar. Most of the event names came from an article from The Weather Channel titled 2011: Weather by the Billions.
The image sources are the same as last year’s, so the same explanations and caveats still apply. Notably, the monochrome satellite image does not show clouds, and the color satellite image does not show storms — though there is a strong correlation between those images and clouds and storms. Those are two different renderings of infrared images that basically record temperature. Clouds are generally colder as they get higher, so they cause cool areas in the infrared images, which are rendered white in the monochrome images. Storm clouds generally are tall clouds, and their tops are cooler (that’s where hail forms, e.g.), and those cold tops are highlighted in the color satellite image. But lower, warmer clouds may not show up distinctly in these images at all.
As for the radar, those are modified from the NOAA originals with a simple-minded noise reduction method — all radar returns below a certain level are simply removed. That gets rid of noise around the radar stations that, when animated, is rendered as really annoying pulses.This causes light precipitation to be absent from some frames. The interesting weather is there, though. (As is some of the noise, still.)
Details and licenses after the break.
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.
http://www.vimeo.com/20678128
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.)
Here is another video of that storm on May 8, 2009, that caused widespread damage and killed several people. It formed strong bow echos and with derechos that caused much of the damage along with some small tornados.
Yes, it was a while ago, but it was an unusual event, and its radar image and progression are interesting. This is a close-up that follows this one storm system from its genesis over Kansas until it crosses over Virginia into the Atlantic. For this animation I used NOAA composite radar images stored at mesonet.agron.iastate.edu on the suggestion of a reader. Thanks! Some technical discussion and production notes after the break.
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I’m posting an updated animation of the composite US weather radar every 10 minutes to http://egb13.net/weather/radar/. It won’t be up to the second, but the last frame should be within the last ten minutes or so. Okay, maybe every ten minutes isn’t “continuously”; substitute “regularly” if you will. The animation covers approximately the previous 24 hours, and no archives are currently available. The timestamps at the top of the frame are UTC, which will let you know what period you’re looking at.
The embedded video is a Theora encoding in an Ogg-format file which is embedded using HTML5 semantics. Therefore, it can only be viewed in relatively modern standards-based browsers which support Ogg-Theora video objects. From what I read it should play in recent versions of Firefox, Opera, and Chrome. I’ve tried it with Firefox and Chrome. It probably will not play in Safari or Interweb Exploder.
The page has a link to a 3GP version of the animation that will play on many or most media-capable phones. That might play in your browser, too, if you have a compatible plug-in. It will play with mplayer and other media players. The 3GP version is higher quality than the Theora version because it has a higher bit rate, and because the Theora video is transcoded from it, and at a lower bitrate, which must introduce more loss into the signal.
I download the radar composite every 10 minutes as a transparent georeferenced GIF image from the National Weather Service. It gets layered over a region of NASA’s Blue Marble image along with the state lines, the result is transformed using the same projection used by National Atlas. The timestamp is added last so that it won’t be warped, too. The timestamp ought to be the same as the modification time of the original file on NOAA’s server. More detailed descriptions of this process are available elsewhere on this site — use the search function if necessary.
Download regularly if you like. My hosting plan was recently modified by the provider to support unlimited bandwidth; we’ll see how that goes.
Enjoy!
It was a bright but rainy day at the height of the fall colors, so we took a Sunday drive out to the boonies. I took the camera, but didn’t use it, though the trees were very colorful. Fortunately, I did take the GPS! This video shows the location of our car on a map in relation to the weather as we drove along. If that sounds boring, don’t worry, it has an epic soundtrack thanks to Free Music by DanoSongs.com. Note that the time scale in this video is not constant, as explained in the production notes after the break.
We’d never been to Hermann before, so we stopped at the winery. It’s a very picturesque town, but it was infested with Oktoberfest tourists, and we didn’t stay long. Much later we stopped in Cuba for a fast-food dinner after deciding to try to beat the storms out of Rolla. It was dark by then. There was some spectacular cloud-to-cloud lightning to the north of the highway on the way back to town, before the rains caught us again.
Looks good full screen. I wonder if YouTube does a two-pass reencoding? This looks a lot better now than when I first uploaded it.
