New BoM Satellite Imagery - High Res, Near Real-Time

[Phil Hart]

Good news for the weather geeks among us.. satellite imagery for Australia is now available at higher resolution and much higher frequency (every ten mins instead of once per hour):

News here (check out the video post):
https://www.facebook.com/bureauofmeteorology

View the new imagery here:
http://satview.bom.gov.au/

cheers
Phil

[Regulus]

Thanks for that Phil. never too much info.

Trev

[gregbradley]

Wow, that's a fantastic upgrade.

Greg.

[goober]

There is a ton of data coming in too - a lot has gone on behind the scenes with this one.

[Meru]

That's a great link, didn't know it existed. So amazing!

[andyc]

The BoM animations are excellent (and not a little mesmerising, especially towards the tropics, the Indonesian fires are quite prominent)... but they're not the highest resolution imagery, which you can get at himawari8.nict.go.jp/ (http://himawari8.nict.go.jp/) The controls are a lot less self-explanatory and clunkier, but it is possible to get animations there too, and zoom in on uncompressed versions of the images on the Bureau's site to a true 1km/pixel. But for most practical purposes, the Bureau's images and animations are great, could watch the clouds swirling for hours!

[AndrewJ]

Has anyone found how to zoom in past the artificial limits they seem to have imposed.
Ie i can zoom the Himawari data to a set point, and past that, it still allows a zoom, but then snaps back to a set resolution within about 1/2 a second???
Bit like they dont want you to see too much???

Andrew

[andyc]

Himawari-8's channel 3 data is 1/2km resolution, so conceivably there is more to see. However, it doesn't seem to be publicly available (though if it's like the old MTSAT-1R data, then the met organisations like BoM and JMA will have the best data for private use). I think the zoom effect you describe never lets you see the 0.5km data, it just stretches the 1km stuff before popping back out to 1km resolution?

[SpaceTas]

Yes it looks like the best possible resolution is not reached. Despite looks the zoom on web maps e.g google, theLIST (which I am associated with in my day job) ... is not continuous but in a set of steps. They are not neat scales like 1:10,000 ...

[RobF]

Wow - how beautiful is that, watching the animation of the last 24hrs. Just beautiful to watch the colours of sunrise and sunset reflected in the oceans, but also see the reflection of the sun throughout the day :eyepop:

[ZeroID]

Both very cool to watch and quite informative.
Thanks

[RobF]

Has anyone else noticed the animations no longer working at Brisbane Storm chasers site for MTSTAT? This used to be my first port of call for scanning local skies.

http://realtime2.bsch.com.au/vis_sat2.html?region=brisbane&loop=yes&images=6&allday=&start=&stop=

[andyc]

Yeah, I'm not sure what's up with the BSCH animations. You can still see the latest satellite image, and access a good suite of GFS model outputs for Australia - like the cloud cover forecasts that end up at SkippySky, or the useful relative humidity forecast, or storm probabilities (which has been recently updated). I guess that when the Himawari feed came online, something happened to the way that the MTSAT-1R images were archived, and so some of the links on the BSCH page stopped working? But I'm speculating!

[RobF]

NNNoooooooo!!!!!
The BOM Access pages (www.cawcr.gov.au/staff/ljr/projects/forcloops.htm) seem to have been taken down. Does anyone know if these are still available?. I always had the feeling there were a research hangover someone left up for the public good.

They would have to have to have been THE most valuable thing I ever used before contemplating setting up my gear. Particularly in the Brissie summer months, nothing comes close to the accuracy of those cloud models. :sadeyes:

[sharptrack2]

Throwing in my 2 cents...

After some lengthy reading and research, I suspect the page was never suppose to be public. It looks like the website has maybe had a refresh and they found the open portal and closed it. That is supposition since I have not seen what the page looked like prior to you guys mentioning it not working.

This link is to a paper that was submitted 2 years ago and page 29 explains what the missing page was suppose to do.
http://www.virtuallab.bom.gov.au/files/9313/8119/0983/4th_AOMSUC_Abstracts_-_FINAL.pdf

The new webpage clearly stipulates that the information in the projects is only for authorised representatives of either the CSIRO or Government. The Project "ACCESS" seems to be the parent of the satellite images.

I also suspect that the new satellite viewer on the BOM site is a derivative of this project - without the forecast capability?

[andyc]

The forecast satellite loops - I presume you were viewing BoM ACCESS-G (http://www.bom.gov.au/australia/charts/about/about_access.shtml) model forecast loops you weren't meant to see? Pity you lost the access if you found them good!

Kevin, they were forecast synthetic satellite images, giving a modelled idea of cloud cover, which is really handy for planning an observation session. ACCESS-G is the Bureau's global weather forecasting model. You can see similar cloud cover images from the GFS forecast model at this link (BSCH) e.g. 10pm Saturday (http://forecasts.bsch.com.au/stormcast.html?ops=gfs:2015112100:2 015112212:aus:cloud-total:null:0#sc). The new BoM satellite viewer shows real satellite images from earlier in the day, also very handy for giving a rough idea if clouds are headed your way a few hours before an observing session.