Weather Satellite Tools from SatSignal Software

I am currently writing software for weather satellites with the aim of automating as much as possible, and allowing you to extract the maximum possible from the available data.  A more detailed technical description of some of the earlier software is also available on-line.  This software should run on any current version of Windows (Windows-7 or later), including the 64-bit and Server versions.  The Apple Mac OS is supported through virtual machine software and the WINE add-on can be used for Linux.  There is a partial list of data available from EUMETSAT here, together with a guide as to which data is handled by which of my programs.

The Tools

• ATOVS Reader - reads the thermal sounder and microwave radiometer data available either from the CLASS archive service or from the EUMETSAT EARS service (retransmitting polar orbiting satellite data for Europe), and presents a remapped false-colour display of the 40 available channels.
     
• AVHRR Manager - decompresses the NOAA-19, Metop-A and Metop-B AVHRR data received from multiple stations on the EUMETCast stream, re-assembles that data into composite files, handles out-of-order data and short segments, provides an optional audible warning of new pass and new segments, and provides an attractive quick-look display of current segment and pass data.  Includes a browser for easy access to thumbnail or AVHRR data using the HRPT Reader.
    
• BUFR Viewer - a program to visualise the wind data available on the EUMETCast data stream.  This includes air-motion vector data (derived from Meteosat-9/10), wind data from the scatterometers on the ERS-2 and Metop-A/B satellites, and polar wind data.
   
• CHLO Viewer - a program to visualise and read out values of ocean chlorophyll concentration data sent over EUMETCast and downloaded from the Ocean Color Web site.
    
• CMA Viewer - a program to visualise the CMA (China Meteorological Administration) data sent over EUMETCast, including Cloud Type Analysis, Cloud Total Amount, Relative humidity, Outgoing Long-wave Radiation, Precipitation Estimate, Black-Body temperature and Total Precipitable Water-Vapour.  The program can be used interactively or in command-line mode for completely automatic operation for saving the data as images.
     
• DWDSAT HRPT Viewer - program to  visualise the calibrated and rectified HRPT data from various NOAA satellites covering the central European region, and provided as part of the free DWDSAT service broadcast over EUMETCast.
    
• GeoSatSignal - a tool for geostationary weather satellites, which can join images, make false-colour images by combining various data channels, rectify images to various standard projections, overlay weather charts, and animate a sequence of images to make your own weather movie.  You can process image or digital data from either the EUMETCast service, your own receiver, or download data from the Internet if you prefer.  The unsupported AutoGet or Francis Breame's getCharts may be used to get Internet data automatically.
     
• GRIB Viewer - visualise the cloud data (including cloud-top height), clear-sky reflectance, and DWDSAT data broadcast over EUMETCast, and the DPDS data from the UK Met Office.  More data sources may be added for registered users.
     
• GroundMap - rectifies HRPT or APT images from NOAA satellites to standard map projections allowing for subsequent processing e.g. combining several passes to make a wide-area image, using data with other programs etc.  The software can remap geostationary data as well.
     
• HDF Viewer - visualise the Land Surface Analysis SAF European data broadcast over EUMETCast and African and American data available from the LSA-SAF Web site.  This data includes the down-welling flux separated into long-wave and short-wave components, and land surface temperature data.
     
• HRPT Reader - processes HRPT data in a variety of formats (including from the EUMETCast EARS AVHRR service) and can produce false-colour images and APT thumbnails.  Individual sensor channels can be viewed or combined to RGB channels, with temperature calibration and geographic overlays.  You can process data from your own receiver, or data obtained from the Internet, so no receiver is required.  Includes the ability to remove the scanner geometric distortion from raw HRPT images.
     
• Kepler Manager - can provide completely automated Kepler management for registered users of the Space-Track Web site.  The registered version (or if you have the registered version of WXtrack) allows hands-off update scheduling.
      
• MapToGeo - can reprocess Plate-Carreé projection image data into standard geostationary mappings to form backgrounds for live geostationary thermal data.
     
• Metop Manager - a new program to automate management of the global, continuous, world-wide coverage AVHRR data from Metop-A as broadcast over EUMETCast.
     
• MSG Animator - provides real-time monochrome or false-colour animations of Meteosat-8/9/10 and foreign satellite data images from the MSG Data Manager with four or more (depends on your PC) simultaneous animations from thirty available.  You can select which channel and regional subset to use, and boundary overlay and contrast stretch options are included.  Animations can be time-selective, and saved as standard .AVI files.  For use in a public display environment, the program can automatically switch between the available animations, making it ideal for a reception or office entrance area.  For use in a museum or space-centre environment, input from a touch-screen is supported allowing visitor interaction.
     
• MSG Data Manager - provides data management of the vast flow of Meteosat-8, 9 and 10 (Indian Ocean, Europe & Africa), GOES-East & GOES-West (Americas), Chinese FY, Japanese Himawari-8 (Asia) and more data, enabling you to automatically delete the HRIT source data, decode and process the data into images, and select which channel images to keep.  Data is saved in industry standard image formats, not proprietary, and the program can function with networks as recommended by EUMETSAT.  More info about acquiring MSG data.
     
• NOAA HDF Viewer - Program to display Australian Geoscience data, all five AVHRR HRPT channels at 1 km resolution over Australia, with a variety of derived data such as vegetation, temperatures, dust/ash and fire possibility.  New program still under development.
   
• PassControl - automatically tune your APT receiver (RX2, R2FX) to pick up NOAA passes you schedule.
     
• SatSignal - NOAA APT/Meteor/Okean/Meteosat/GOES/GMS/MTSAT-1R wave file to picture demodulator.   Decodes saved wave file or 2-channel NOAA image to pictures with false colour, overlays and temperature readout etc.  Read more about SatSignal.  Includes SatBatch an automated driving program for SatSignal and WXtrack to decode a whole folder full of wave files from a day's or a week's collection.
     
• Sentinel-2 - I offer a couple of programs for Sentinel-2 which will process the three 16-bit JPEG 2000 images you can download from the EOS Web site into high-quality full-colour JPEGs suitable for general use.  The main program is Sentinel2toJPEG which does the three JPEG 2000 to on JPG conversion, and the second is an ancillary program - ThreeJP2toPNG48 - which converts the three JPEG 2000 files into a single 48-bit PNG or TIFF file for faster process.  These programs are presently in beta.
   
• Sentinel-3 - This page describes reception of the Sentinel-3 data over EUMETCast, and offers scripts using Python and other software for automated processing of the data to full-colour JPEG images.
   
• Sea-Ice & Viewer - provides three false-colour interpretations of the sea-ice and sea-surface-temperature data available over the EUMETCast broadcast system and the full north-polar and south-polar data from the OSI-SAF Norwegian Web site.
     
• WXtrack - Satellite orbit, ground track & ground image prediction.  Drives trackers.  Also available as an Active-X component for other languages.  Read more about using WXtrack.  Now available in 3D!
  

As I am continually revising these programs, I also provide a page of updates to show the status of all my software.  You can bookmark this page and get automatic notification by e-mail of any updates if you wish.  There are free versions of all my satellite programs, but I will obviously feel more encouraged to add new features if you choose to make a small contribution by registering the program to obtain support.   I'd rather spend my time enhancing the software than answering questions that are already covered in the ReadMe or Help files, so please do check these out first....  There is a free, self-help group that you can join here: https://groups.io/g/SatSignal where other users of the software can be contacted and ideas for updates are discussed.
I don't currently offer any software for the ENVISAT project, but I can offer to write other satellite decoding and display software for your own special needs.

The Suites

As many people want more than one item of software, I have provided two suites of programs, one suitable for geostationary data over EUMETCast, and the other for polar orbiter data over EUMETCast.

• The MSG Toolset Plus suite includes:
  • The MSG Data Manager - data decoding and management
  • The MSG Animator - multiple, single-channel animations
  • GeoSatSignal - multi-channel, reprojected images and animations
• The HRPT Toolset suite includes:
  • The AVHRR Manager - data decoding and management
  • The HRPT Reader - data display
  • GroundMap - image rectification
  • WXtrack - orbit prediction
  • The Kepler Manager - Kepler management
• The HRPT Toolset Plus suite includes:
  • The AVHRR Manager - EARS/AVHRR data decoding and management
  • The Metop Manager - Metop/AVHRR and NOAA-18/GAC data decoding and management
  • The HRPT Reader - data display
  • GroundMap - image rectification
  • WXtrack - orbit prediction
  • The Kepler Manager - Kepler management

Publishing data

Please respect the publishing requirements of the different data sources when using my software.

Guidelines on publishing EUMETSAT data are here.

In Dutch

For an overview of my software please see:
  http://www.meteo-maarssen.nl/software.html

In French

For a brief summary in French, please see:
  http://www.f6bek.fr/ => Documentation (http://www.f6bek.fr/perso-23417.htm)

 
What is the Mac Support?

Also I have done some other tests with a Macbook with Mac OS X v10.5 2GB ram 120GB hard disk using bootcamp, I have tested the following (all latest versions):

AVHRR Manager GeoSatSignal, Metop Manager, MSG Animator, WXtrack

All work fine.

Jiro Yamamoto reports that major software, including HRPT Reader, WXtrack, GeoSatSignal and GroundMap, is working without any problems (quite stable !) under his Parallels Desktop 3.0 for Mac.

Alejo comments:  Hi David, perhaps you knew it but here is a screenshot of your nice software running under Mac OS X Leopard i only lack 2 things that i became used to from SatScape (crashing is not one): 1. speech synthesiser announcing the passes 2. the radio freqs on the main window info. Let me know if you like to know more about how to get it to run, it  was very easy.

(Click for a larger image)

You can also try the free VirtualBox software.  

The software should also work correctly under the Microsoft Virtual PC (note that only Windows can host this software).

What is the Linux Support?

Jeff Kelly comments:  Had some time today to play with Wine on my Celena Linux Mint (ubuntu) distro.  Both WXtrack and the HRPT Reader all ran fine with all the testing I have been able to do.  Basically you just need to place wine in front of the path to the program exe and it starts right up.

(Click for a larger image)

Les Hamilton comments that he has installed the Runtime Library using 'Wine', and has now successfully run SatSignal, the HRPT Reader and WXtrack under Ubuntu Linux, via the Wine 1.00 emulator. Further tests have shown that some of the more recent programs - the ones which require a hardware fingerprint -may need a special-to-order version for WINE, as some of the advanced APIs required are missing from some versions of WINE, although this has not been a problem people have reported recently.

Which tools do I need?

I am sometimes asked which of my tools does what job, and where they might fit into a typical Weather Satellite receiving station.

Geostationary data:

• If you have no receiver, but still want to process images, or if you want to make animations, GeoSatSignal is for you.  Using data off the Internet it is possible to make movies of the weather data for the many parts of the world, including Japan, Australia, the USA and Europe.  You can choose what data to download and how often using your own preferred Internet tools, or an automated program available with the package or elsewhere. 
• For the new Meteosat-8/9 European geostationary satellites, the MSG Data Manager decodes files received by your satellite dish, DVB card and software into images handling both the HRIT, LRIT and Foreign Satellite Data.  You can animate the images in real-time with the MSG Animator, or make false-colour remapped images or animations with GeoSatSignal.  Package MSG Toolset Plus.

For polar data broadcast over EUMETCast, there are three possibilities.

• For the EARS-AVHRR data (near-real-time NOAA-17 and NOAA-18 covering an extended Europe), the AVHRR Manager will produce single-pass combined files for the segments sent over EUMETCast.  The HRPT Reader program will visualise the resulting files, and GroundMap rectify the results to standard map projections.  You may also wish to use the Kepler Manager to keep your Keplers up-to-date.  Most of the functions of this software can be automated, using simple batch files you develop to meet your own customised needs.  Package HRPT Toolset.
• For the Metop-A data being sent over EUMETCast since November 2006, you can use my Metop Manager.  This data is sent 24 x 7, and provides continuous, world-wide coverage at 1km resolution - something we have never seen before.  The Metop Manager helps you manage this great influx of data, and allows you to select regions of the earth for further visualisation with the HRPT Reader and GroundMap tools mentioned above.
• The free DWDSAT service offers data from a number of NOAA satellites (e.g. NOAA-15, 17 and 18) pre-rectified to the central-Europe region at a fixed ground resolution.  My DWDSAT HRPT Viewer allows visualisation of that data, and some false-colour and channel combination options as well.  The DWDSAT data is available as both TIFF files, and .PL1 files.  The latter have a higher resolution, similar to the native satellite resolution (1km).

For polar orbiting satellites, NOAA, Meteor or Resurs, there is both the lower-resolution APT data, and the higher resolution HRPT data.  

• For HRPT.  My HRPT reader can read HRPT and CHRPT data files in a variety of formats and produce images including false-colour pictures, as well as indicative aerosol and vegetation density plots.  The program can correct the image geometry to resemble a normal picture, or you can use my separate Correct Geometry program (also works with MODIS images).  To remap the data to standard map projections, you can use my GroundMap software.  The HRPT Reader can read files available from the Comprehensive Large Array-data Stewardship System (CLASS) and the Space Monitoring Information Support (SMIS), or the data files saved by Timestep, Quorum, SSB/Orbit and NOAA95 hardware.  You will need either to use your own data acquisition hardware and software, or to download data files off the Internet to use with this program.  You can also read files processed from the EUMETCast AVHRR broadcasts from NOAA-17, NOAA-18 and Metop-A.
• For APT.  Once you have demodulated the RF signal from your APT receiver, you will typically have a 2400Hz carrier which is amplitude modulated with the image information.  You can use any software you like to record this signal as a wave file to your computer via the sound card.  Personally, I use Christian Bock's excellent WXSat.  Les Hamilton has provided a Beginner's Guide for WXSat which I suggest you read.
  My SatSignal program will decode saved wave files and produce images including a 2-channel picture and a false-colour image (for NOAA satellites).  The registered version of SatSignal will also decode 2-channel images (allowing you to keep the more compact bitmaps rather than original wave files), and SatSignal can add country and state boundaries, gridlines and so forth.  SatSignal should be able to post-process virtually any wave file produced by other audio or satellite software packages (provided it is in the standard Windows wave file format, 11.025KHz mono) or, with the registered version, any 2-channel image saved in greyscale BMP, JPG or PNG format.
  

I need help - where can I talk to existing users?

I have set up a number of groups to put like-minded users in touch with each other:

• SatSignal - for discussing my software
• ATVOS - for the multi-channel microwave and infra-red polar orbiter data
• AVHRR - for users of the EARS AVHRR service
• DWDSAT - for users of the DWDSAT service
• Metop - for users of the polar-orbiting Metop satellite and other polar data
• MSG-1 - for users of the MSG-1 and MSG-2 data, and EUMETCast in general

Tell me more about Remote Sensing

There is a tutorial available at EOS (Earth Observing System) site at this URL:

    http://rst.gsfc.nasa.gov/
  

GEO - the Group for Earth Observation

You should support the Group for Earth Observation - a group of mainly amateur enthusiasts with members spread across the world who communicate via the GEO-Subscribers self-help group, through regular GEO Symposia, and through the first class GEO Quarterly magazine - read and respected across the world.  Try joining for a year and I guarantee you will be hooked for life!

 

Copyright © David Taylor, Edinburgh

@gm8arv on Twitter

Last modified: 2020 Jan 25 at 09:19