Windy launches Satellite layer

jmh2002

WOW that's awesome!!!

THANKS to Ivo, Milan, Tomas, Martin, Jakub, Jindra, and all of the Windy Team!

Gkikas LGPZ

@ivo
Fantastic!
Many thanks to Ivo and the windy team! Aim High!

Description needed https://community.windy.com/topic/3361/description-of-weather-overlays
Q: the color overlay in INFRA+ has to do with
cloud top temperature,
precipitation estimate or
instantaneous precipitation rate ?

csabatatar

It's really really awesome!
Thank you Ivo and Windy Team for your hard work! You made a unique brand new extremely useful feature again! Congrats!
I think this satellite feature was waited by a huge amount of people, and now it became reality! From now everybody can use this eye-catching satellite feature and take care of their safety.
My question is the same as @Gkikas-LGPZ about the INFRA+ feature colour overlay.

Autist

Great idea to add animated clouds satellites! Well done, keep up the good work, we appreciate your work and love you very much!

TZ

@Gkikas-LGPZ @csabatatar It is visualisation of low temperatures - peaks in IR10.8 channel. So information is the same as in Infra, but Infra+ has additional colour palette.

Gkikas LGPZ

@TZ
is there a color scale? e.g. blue < -20C, red < -30C etc

It would be great if the picker shows (cloud top) temperature
19829085-4384-45ac-b527-7f3af21840ae-εικόνα.png

phouqueoff

Love the idea. I know it can only improve as it goes through Beta stage testing.

idefix37

It's really fabulous !! This addition is huge, congratulations to the team !

setvak

@Gkikas-LGPZ

Detailed description of why we (weather satellite community) use this color scheme can be found e.g. here: https://cwg.eumetsat.int/color-enhancements/

In brief - the color layout follows:

Wien's displacement law - blue color represents warmer range, red coldest range (the same principle as color of stars in astronomy)
Red is for a human brain a signal of some form of danger - in case of convective storms the most dangerous parts of storm tops are the highest tops, which are also the coldest ones.

The typical color enhancement range for European (mid-latitude) storms is between 200K (red) and 240K (blue). For higher latitudes it needs to be shifted to the warmer range, while for tropics and subtropics it needs to be shifted to 190-230K, for the highest storms to 185-225K. It does NOT represent actual distribution and intensity of precipitation, though the coldest parts of storms are in most cases precipitating. In some cases even cirrus clouds (namely those in mountain waves or in a jet-stream) can be very cold, but without any precipitation.

Martin Setvák, CHMI

iz5bxf

Simply Fantastic

Gkikas LGPZ

@setvak
thank you for the definitions.
Here in Windy (INFRA+) and for Mid-Latitudes, colored (blue) layer starts at 240K (-33C) ?
Personally, I preffer to start "colorize" IR images from -20C, which is a typical temp. for TCU starting to become a CB (IMHO)

setvak

@Gkikas-LGPZ

The reason for selecting 240K is that most storm anvils are at roughly this temperature (their warmest parts). When we were testing this color scheme about 12 years ago, we wanted to have the blue approx. outlining the storm anvils. Warmer temperatures depict also some of the lower, mid-level clouds, which we wanted to avoid.

TZ

@Gkikas-LGPZ It should be as @setvak wrote, i.e. range 240-200K, because we tried to create same palette like CHMI. Unfortunately it seems that there is still some bug, so the colour values are shifted. We will fix it.
I agree that it could be useful to shift colours for tropical/polar regions, but it could be misleading to use one colour for different temperatures in one picture. So this will probably remain constant.

setvak

@TZ
You can try using some of the color palettes which are downloadable from the link above, or you can contact me directly by email. I would highly appreciate if the colors and their range can be the same (or very close) as on our website (http://portal.chmi.cz/files/portal/docs/meteo/sat/data_jsmsgview.html >> IR-BT), this way we would not confuse the public. EUMETSAT also uses the same color palette.
Re: (not) shifting the color range: this was rather a note that other weather services modify the range depending on their latitude or geographical region; for global images (as those used by you) this is impossible. BTW, the color scale usability also depends at the given location on actual height of the tropopause - with lower tropopause (e.g. polar air intrusions) the storm top temperatures are generally warmer, thus in those cases the storm tops appear in IR-BT images more blueish ...

djare

5 min step, as well as some next 60 min prediction, would be very usefull

Chriscod

Hi Windfolk
I use my ap for areas over the coast mostly. Great South Bay NY (southern Long Island)
the current Sat image is very dark in all the water areas which it is not in most other sat images There is a lot of nuance there that is lost...Good luck and thanks for your work!

Gkikas LGPZ

@setvak
@TZ
I fully understand the reason you use this color palette (240-200K).
Is it possible to have the ability to read (using the picker) the cloud top temperature ?
It would be very usefull for pilots (and aviation meteorologists) to know the temperature,
for computing the cloud top height. So, they will know (during the climb phase) the height they will be "on top".
Thank you again and congats for this new big feature.