Good afternoon sysadmins,
With the 10th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approaching requests are starting to arrive in force for movies, images, etc. from the operational (primary) geostationary satellite in 2005, GOES-12, also known as GOES East. I have revisited the data to make sure that HD and UHD and beyond users have high resolution clouds to work with. Please pass along to anyone interested.
These images are in the public domain. You cannot copyright any of the
images but you may use them in any way you see fit. Please credit NOAA,
just those 4 letters, for use.
Mixed visible and infrared sequences:
ftp://ftp.nnvl.noaa.gov/GOES/katrina2005/northernhemisphere/...contains 483 routine northern hemisphere operations half-hourly JPEGs.
ftp://ftp.nnvl.noaa.gov/GOES/katrina2005/CONUSrapidscan/...contains
the increased scans around Katrina in variable time steps from 5 to 15
minutes, 1262 images in the sequence. These data do not cover the entire 8192x5000 canvas (except for
the half-hour and 3-hour time steps), so are useful for HD and UHD closeups on
the storm.
Visible channel 1, 1 km resolution only:
...contains the visible increased scans centered on the Gulf at full resolution. When its dark it's dark; as dawn rises the Sun lights up the clouds and they fade out at dusk. The dark frames are provided for continuity. This is the full resolution of the clouds as BMPs.
..is a NASA Blue Marble cloud-free true color basemap matched to these images. If you use it, please credit NASA.
GOES East's Imager scanned the northern hemisphere from the eastern Atlantic through CONUS to the west coast every half hour, and scanned north pole to south pole every 3 hours. During Hurricane Katrina there was also a smaller sector scanned more often just around Katrina.
Satellites in this series required the Imager to power down during the time of the day when the solar panels were eclipsed from the Sun, unfortunately coinciding with the peak time frame for hurricane formation. There is a 2-hour window roughly 0230Z to 0430Z with no data, which manifests as a "jump" in the sequence progression.
Channel 1 visible at 1 km and channel 4 IR at 4 km were combined to make the mixed sequences at a resolution of 2 km per pixel. At dusk on each day the visible data fades and the IR becomes dominant until the next morning.
The data was reprojected into cylindrical equidistant so any number of common earth imagery base maps can be used. The half-hourly images are cropped to 8192x5000 so there is a clean rectangle of data values for each 8 bit, 256 level grayscale JPEG.
Image sizes range from 6 - 40 MB each; the BMPs are larger than the JPEGs of course.
The bottom 12 pixels contain an image footer with McIDAS format info, so for instance you'll see 29 AUG 05241 024000 - 29 August, year 05, Day 241, 02:40:00 UTC (or Zulu). This information can be used for annotation. Every designer has their own specific graphics requirements for each production, which is one motivation to try to spread the word about these fundamental renderings. We don't have time to tweak and render every possibility.
Sequences start at 0015Z August 22 and end 2345Z September 1. The data source is the Space Science and Engineering Center, University of Wisconsin GOES Archive McIDAS AREA format files.
These sequences contain every available GOES East image time step from the period, a change of data per frame. There may be some scanning/solar intrusion artifacts in some frames.
