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MSG-4, Europe’s latest weather satellite, delivers first image
- phireal 11y agoTo the best of my knowledge, this thing takes snapshots of its viewing field every 15 minutes. That'll be tremendously helpful for calibrating atmospheric and ocean models of ecosystem dynamics.
- kuschku 11y agoAnd Japan recently launched another satellite with the same interval and resolution!
- phireal 11y agoSimilarly, the South Koreans have a geostationary satellite (GOCI) [0]. It's sampling interval is a bit lower (3 hourly) but has a high spatial resolution (500m). [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Ocean_Color_Imager https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geostationary_Ocean_Color_Imag...
- kuschku 11y agoThe sampling interval of the Japanese and the European satellite is really interesting, though, because it allows to view more than half of earth in 15min intervals. We can see live the movement of clouds and typhoons around the earth. This is really powerful.
- slightlycuban 11y agoDepends on the resolution and scan area you're talking about. I think the .5km can go off every 15min. But the 2km can go out every 5. But that's nothing. IIRC, the Mesoscale (a 1000km x 1000km box somewhere in the hemisphere) can go out every 30s. On top of that, I believe you can snap a Meso without interrupting normal operations. Here in the US, the idea of getting a snapshot of a Tropical Wave out every 30s during, say, hurricane season is very, very exciting.
- wolfgke 11y agoIs there a (rather) easy way to obtain the MSG-4 images using SDR like it is possible for NOAA and Meteor-M N2 (http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weather-satellite-images/ http://www.rtl-sdr.com/rtl-sdr-tutorial-receiving-noaa-weath...)?
- opk 11y agoGo to http://www.eumetsat.int/ http://www.eumetsat.int/ and follow links on data delivery. The eumetcast system lets you pick up data using normal satellite TV hardware but you're not picking it up direct from, e.g. MSG-4. It is broadcast via another satellite much as for, e.g. a TV signal. You can also get some data via the Internet.
- iso8859-1 11y agoMeteor-M N2 is in polar orbit, so you may need a fancy antenna to receive MSG, which is in geostationary orbit (don't quote me on this, but this reddit user has the same suspicion https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/23pquc/can_you_receive_geostationary_weather_sattelites/ch1roen https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/23pquc/can_you_rece...). But EUMETSAT (contractor of MSG-4) has EUMETcast for distributing the images: http://satsignal.eu/wxsat/atovs/index.html http://satsignal.eu/wxsat/atovs/index.html That works over DVB though, which would be disappointing for you since you wanna talk to satellites. There is a library for decoding the proprietary formats: https://sourceforge.net/p/meteosatlib/wiki/Home/ https://sourceforge.net/p/meteosatlib/wiki/Home/ The linked Reddit thread has this very nice answer: https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/23pquc/can_you_receive_geostationary_weather_sattelites/cgzy6te https://www.reddit.com/r/RTLSDR/comments/23pquc/can_you_rece...
- happyscrappy 11y agoLive stream encrypted and six hour delay for unencrypted, am I reading that right?
- kylehotchkiss 11y agodoh! I just asked a similar question without seeing yours :)
- revelation 11y agoReally, the weather satellite delivered a 1.4M JPEG?
- kuschku 11y agoNo, it delivered a 34M JPG https://farm1.staticflickr.com/265/19667653813_94a68f5644_o.jpg https://farm1.staticflickr.com/265/19667653813_94a68f5644_o....
- amelius 11y agoThe linked page shows an image of the complete Earth. Is that really the viewing angle of this satellite?
- iso8859-1 11y agoYes, it is in geostationary orbit.
- paulrouget 11y agoSo it's not a composition? It's exactly 10am UTC everywhere in this picture?
- pierrec 11y agoI think what iso8859 is trying to say is that a geostationary orbit is very far, so it's still a narrow angle, as illustrated here: http://stream2.cma.gov.cn/pub/comet/SatelliteMeteorology/GOESRBenefitsofNextGenerationEnvironmentalMonitoring/comet/goes_r/envmon/media/graphics/goes_orbit.jpg http://stream2.cma.gov.cn/pub/comet/SatelliteMeteorology/GOE... No composition required.
- branchan 11y agoUhhh....no?
- pavs 11y agoThis has to be the sharpest picture of earth I have seen...
- pavs 11y agoYou can see a lot of jagged edges on the left side of the higher resolution image: http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/images/2015/08/msg-4_europe_s_latest_weather_satellite_delivers_first_image/15547768-1-eng-GB/MSG-4_Europe_s_latest_weather_satellite_delivers_first_image.jpg http://www.esa.int/var/esa/storage/images/esa_multimedia/ima...
- stargazer-3 11y agoGood catch! But I think the jagged edges there result from an arbitrary clipping of the brightness values, done to remove the "noise" pixels, i.e. to make the space look darker. If that's the case, it isn't the resolution that's to blame - just a post-processing (for public release) issue.
- hliyan 11y agoAm I imagining it or does North Africa look dryer than it did in Apollo era photographs?
- stargazer-3 11y agoIf you check the caption you'll see that it's an infrared color image (except for the blue channel, which is in red 600um). Therefore the picture is probably more sensitive to the surface temperature variations, and, consecutively, North Africa might look dryer indeed.
- Y-bar 11y agoThis. Also, the precipitation since the late sixties in the area surrounding the Saharan desert has been below average, leading to desertification (http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/environment-book/desertificationinsahel.html http://oceanworld.tamu.edu/resources/environment-book/desert...): > Years of above average rainfall from the 1950s to the 1970s, were followed by drought in the sahel starting in the late 1960s. The drought has had a devastating impact on this ecologically vulnerable region and was a major impetus in the establishment of the United Nations Convention on Combating Desertification and Drought. So, during the 1960:s North Africa probably looked extra lush because it had experienced over a decade of above-average precipitation.
- johansch 11y agohttps://www.flickr.com/photos/eumetsat/19667653813/sizes/l https://www.flickr.com/photos/eumetsat/19667653813/sizes/l "Original (16672 x 9378)" :)
- vvvv 11y agoWill not load :)
- Ono-Sendai 11y agoOriginal size crashes my chrome tab :)
- lorenzhs 11y agoInteresting that it crashes yours, works fine for me (Chrome 44 on Debian unstable). The tab uses around 800MB while the picture is loading and then immediately drops to ~160MB and further to ~90MB after a while. Scrolling is quite laggy, though.
- victorantos 11y agowhen it starts loading the image right click on the image and then Save As. Chrome will crash but the picture will be downloaded(30MB+)
- addandsubtract 11y agoDirect link: https://farm1.staticflickr.com/265/19667653813_94a68f5644_o.jpg https://farm1.staticflickr.com/265/19667653813_94a68f5644_o....
- johansch 11y agoPreview on OS X works surprisingly well with a giant JPEG like this. It seems like its doing clever stuff(tm) when decoding the image for various zoom levels. Chrome should (I mean.. it doesn't, but it really should) do this as well.
- 11y ago
- victorantos 11y agoChrome crashes on me when I try to open original photo
- kylehotchkiss 11y agoAnybody know what frequency + modulation this thing broadcasts? Any hope for a little radio + twin helix antenna to pick up images?
- digibo 11y agoWhile joesoap's comment on the article page is hilarious, it made me think - are there any technological issues to providing (nearly) real-time low-res video feed? It would be scientifically useless, so this is more of a theoretical question about the tech/physics involved.