I'd love to have something like this as an animated desktop wallpaper - but it should be moving much slower. Are you aware of a movie file that I could use for this?
I wrote a script that downloads the live (well, every 10 minutes, with 30 minutes delay) tiles from the himawari-8 website and update my background with it. Gnome is nice enough that it refreshes the background when the configured image changes.
Xplanet can render to the background and keep an updated view of earth. At some point I obsessed over having current cloud cover images overlaid and that looked really nice. It can even render sun reflections.
Thanks! This was increadable to watch over and over again. I'm so used to highly compressed video, that the detail in this was staggering.
Is there a good public reasonably live feed of this data? I found the 800x800 8 bit pngs, and I found information on the restricted access full sized 103 gigabyte per day feed.
How awesome would it be if we had that kind if quality available from all "sides"... (Ok, yes, one could mostly build displays of blue spheres. But fancy ones ;))
Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites.
Feel free to provide an email address for us to complain.
There's another satellite, DCSOVR, that takes photos of the daylight side of the earth several times a day. It's not as up-to-date as this footage, but it's always fully lit. http://epic.gsfc.nasa.gov/
In addition to the link posted by celoyd, you can get access to the full data stream you mentioned by filling out this application form[0].
There are also some heavily processed images from that data available from NOAA[1] - the "Geocolor Full Disk" is the best, it's half-resolution (5500x5500). The green filter on Himawari's camera doesn't correctly capture the green color of vegetation, which is why OP's video looks browner than you might expect. So this product attempts to correct for that by creating an artificial green channel made of a combination of other channels[2]. It also attempts to correct for Rayleigh scattering[3], so this is basically what the Earth would look like if the atmosphere suddenly disappeared (except for the clouds :P). The night portions of these images are a different kind of false color composite: the clouds come from two infrared channels, white are high ice clouds and red are low wet clouds; the city lights are (sadly) just a static overlay from existing data.
And (shameless plug) I've been playing with applying motion interpolation algorithms to these NOAA images to create smooth, high resolution video that can be played much slower. The Farneback optical flow algorithm[4][5] seems to work very well. (Lots of) videos available on my Youtube channel[6], code/details available here[7][8], blog post coming soon :)
Wow. Great stuff! Is there a good way to use one a video at a very low framerate (perhaps 0.1-1 fps) with low resource requirements as animated wallpaper on Ubuntu/Linux?
Cool demo. On my machine though (high-dpi monitor, win10, firefox) the globe is enormous and way too big for the browser viewport. If I zoom out enough with ctrl-minus it is about the right size, so I think you're sizing the page elements incorrectly in some sort of dpi-unaware fashion. Can probably work around this with devicePixelRatio.
FWIW I don't think ‘enormity’ means what you think it does!
‘Enormity’ refers to severe moral transgression, like you could say, “It wasn't until after the war had ended that the German people became aware of the enormity of Hitler's concentration camps…” That's closer to what the word means.
I appreciate that choice, but maybe add a zoom out button to notify people that you can in fact zoom out, because I didn't even realize I could see the whole earth (Also, this made the 'what is that bright spot moving east to west' question very confusing).
> "Europe’s weather authorities are extremely stingy with their nearest equivalent data – their attitude is that the observations are for science or for money, not for silly websites."
What a terrible attitude we have here. We don't even have the climate change excuse because that attitude doesn't exist here. I did a bit of Googling, it seems that Eumetsat is the agency responsible:
If anyone is interested in drafting a letter with me, asking why our taxpayers' money is being used and the benefits not shared openly, please get in touch. Email in my profile.
In the US we have NOAA for weather. I found about about them when they were being sued by some private forecasters (accuweather I think) for giving away forecast data on the web. (We used to have a weather band radio which would just broadcast the forecast).
The government site [1] is ad free and is very accurate and free from local hype. To the local media snow = ratings. (I bike a lot so I'm a weather watcher). My main complaint is their use of ALL CAPS in the detailed weather discussion[2]
Getting a stream of data from NOAA wasn't so easy for global locations, hourly so when my company needed it we paid weather underground which has a lat/long -> json weather condition api.[3] its was free for developers and small sites and its fun to play around with.
Reading the about page really makes me hope that private efforts to launch mini/nano satellites actually works out. It would be supremely awesome to have easily accessible data & imagery of our planet, rather than have it locked up due to politics and bureaucracy.
> The moon does appear occasionally, dimly – it’s made of rock about as dark as asphalt.
That's what I've always found fascinating in discussions about what's the true color of the moon. I know the fact, and I still have trouble picturing an asphalt moon. No-one I told that believed me.
So is it freshly-poured asphalt black or well-worn asphalt grey? How can its color be compared to something on earth? Doesn't the (lack of) atmosphere have some effect?
It’s a loose comparison, since both asphalt and the moon’s surface vary. Plus, there are tricky things like specular reflection and the opposition effect.
How can its color be compared to something on earth? Doesn't the (lack of) atmosphere have some effect?
You can hold a moon rock up against something on Earth. Or you can look at Earth and the moon from a distance with the same sensor, which is what Himawari-8 is doing.
The atmosphere does affect things: A huge plain of moon rocks on Earth’s surface would look bluer (hazier) than the moon would in the same picture from Himawari-8 (or an Apollo Hasselblad, etc.). And a moon rock in sunlight on Earth will look slightly yellower than one in the same light on the moon. But your eyes are constantly adapting to the surrounding illumination. Color perception is really complicated.
What’s the light-colored border in the water around some continents?
Several things. The turquoise in the tropics ... is shallow water – we’re seeing bright sand under a relatively thin layer of ocean. Around China, it’s air pollution from coal power ...
On firefox, all I see is a part of a sphere (earth?) that gets somewhat illuminated. Laoding stops at 10% .... nothing else happens. What is is supposed to do?
Firefox did this for me too, so I started investigating the glitch. Chrome worked just fine. Overall, this sort of thing would happen to me occasionally (and my colleagues) with h.264 <video> elements: it's some kind of a freaky and infuriating bug. I can't explain it, but I suspected the actual problem was with the original network transmission and a client-side caching mechanism, possibly aggravated by server-side caching mechanisms. Reason why I thought that is below, but now I'm not so sure: I copied that Earth video to a private server and it froze at the same exact spot, albeit it got less frames parsed/decoded/presented/painted than I put below during the S3 render.
Last project I was working on had MP4 files (h.264 encoded) hosted on an iron server, with varnish-cache configured for streaming (streaming config was an attempt to troubleshoot the glitch.) During the development I must have previewed the work-in-progress hundreds of times so I initially chalked the behavior up to caching freaking out. After resetting cache manually or pulling up the file and shift-refreshing, things would work fine for awhile. Attempting to reset cache doesn't fix the stalled Earth video.
The video files I was previously working with were 2-4 mb in size, nearly as 'small' as some larger higher quality images, so I don't think filesize triggered the issue. The ultimate fix for my project was to superstitiously switch from directly-hosting MP4 files to move them to akamai's CDN because that had worked in the past without an observed glitch. I can't explain why this eliminated the problem, but it did (or I just stopped looking at the project): I imagine akamai has a whole bag of tricks up their sleeves, and at that point I was so done with the problem that I didn't care.
That is, I didn't care until I saw this glitch again just hours ago and realized it wasn't just me and my shoddy work that made it happen. So, I pulled up the direct MP4 video of this earth loop (hosted on S3), and pulled up stats for it (right click on video menu). The video was supposed to be 12 seconds long, but it only loaded about 2, letting me see same thing you did before the playback froze. The video stats read the following:
Despite this info dump, firebug revealed (or claimed) that around 32 MB of the file was transmitted. I hit play and the video stopped at 2 seconds. ffprobe claims that nb_frames is 278 (24 * 11.583333), rounded up. So where the heck are the other 89 frames, firefox?? When copying this video to my slower private server, even fewer frames were presented/painted.
I think mucker's excellent comment deserves to be listed under yours:
> to say you won't discuss contentious remarks after being pointedly contentious is really, pathetically bad form. If you dish it out, be prepared to take it.
I thought the about page was rather good and the political points interesting.
tl;dr he argues we can get this data from a Japanese satellite rather than US ones because the climate denial folk have blocked funding.
In linked material:
>[the House of Representatives, led by Republicans] slashed Earth science funding by $260 million and added extra money for planetary science that the agency did not ask for. For example, nasa requested $30 million for a robotic mission to Jupiter's icy moon, Europa, but the House gave it $140 million.
I initially only glanced at the about page without reading it, but after I saw your comment, I went back and read the whole thing. Most of it is just (interesting IMO) info about the site and the technology behind it.
"but our federal science budget is controlled by climate denialists who dishonestly impede Earth observation because environmental science embarrasses them."
Uh no. The House voted not to spend money on a Vice Presidents dream of a beautiful 38 million dollar picture. Now you can argue that it has merit, but even the NY Times (http://www.nytimes.com/1999/06/01/science/politics-keeps-a-s...) leaves that question, quite rightfully, hanging.
And to say you won't discuss contentious remarks after being pointedly contentious is really, pathetically bad form. If you dish it out, be prepared to take it.
Casual readers may not get your reference – the idea for DSCOVR literally came to Al Gore in a dream. I still think this is hilarious.
One can indeed argue that DSCOVR has merit, and people including climate scientists do. (Though arguably it’s really too early to judge either way until there’s time for publications to come out of its data.) Earth’s radiation budget is surprisingly underdetermined, considering its importance.
But it’s certainly a fair criticism of DSCOVR as launched that it’s not state-of-the-art. That’s because it was delayed for reasons of politics, only loosely disguised as reasons of science.
The only places I’d push back on your remarks are:
1. The “Uh no”, which is unsubstantiated (perhaps just facetious, but I’m sensitive because I supported my point relatively laboriously, with the links); and
2. the idea that the NYT should refrain from pointing out political interference in science funding.
Which is why I linked directly to a NY Times peace that gives a fairly balanced discussion of the same.
And it is not fair to claim that it was, "only loosely disguised as reasons of science." The reasons given, in both the Inspector General's report and in the article that I linked to are political reasons of _budget_.
It is not unsubstantiated as I substantiate it via link. I'm also a person that opposed the launch. As others point out, it wasn't _fabulously_ expensive in comparative scale, but in a very stretched NASA budget I would prefer all the pennies thrown at a mars exploration, a permanent moon base, a better space station, or a new shuttle program over a really cool camcorder inspired by a VP's (very literal) dream. That isn't science so much as something bordering on dictatorial whim.
Nor, _anywhere_ do I claim the NYT should somehow not report on science funding. I link directly to it to refute _your_ comments. The NYT article does not support your claim, instead it gives a much more reasonable account of the funding issue. It mentions the dream, the funding, and doesn't resort to slurs.
