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.)
This is a 12-month animation of color-enhanced images from NOAA’s GOES East geostationary weather satellite. It covers all of 2009 except for brief periods when my internet connection or my computer were down. The date and time of each image is at the upper left, if it survives YouTube’s reencoding of the video. This is a bit long, but here it is for the record:
This video is made from infrared images, which measure heat radiation, so what you see here is basically temperature. The color is artificial (obviously!) and is used to enhance the contrast between different temperatures. The temperature is significant because severe weather is usually associated with convective systems which generate tall clouds, and the tops of tall clouds are colder than the tops of low clouds. But that daily pulsing you see isn’t necessarily clouds, as discussed below.
Note that the credits at the end of the video have an error in the URL of the original images, which should be http://www.goes.noaa.gov/GIFS/ECI7.JPG.
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