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Automated Web Publishing of Satellite Imagery

GEOS-8 weather satellite images (UV, IR and Visible) of North America are downlinked to earth stations approximately every 30 minutes and made available on the Internet via ftp. This project consists of a script that checks every 15 minutes to see if the latest images are available. If so, it fetches the IR and Visible images and then pipes them through a series of NetPBM utilities that crop the images and convert them to raw data. A Fortran program then removes the political boundaries and corrects minor defects in the images (such as scan line dropout). At the end of the day, all the images are processed by a data explorer application that builds an set of images in which the IR data has been used to generate a "rubber sheet" surface where the Visible image has been superimposed as a color. An Quicktime object animation of the day's weather is then constructed, where the horizontal scrolling varies azimuth at a fixed altitude, and vertical scrolling controls the temporal aspect of the data. The Quicktime animation is then web-published for meteorology students to download and study.

Please send questions or suggestions about this web page to: sp@rcc.its.psu.edu

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