Windy launches Satellite layer
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Weather radar covers just a fraction of the World. But what is happening outside radar range can play sometimes a crucial role for human safety.
That is why we have decided to add worldwide Satellite layer to Windy.
Huge satellite dish, expensive equipment and a half year of development. Our last addition was not simple at all, but we have worked hard.
So far we have a few issues with Satellite layer and we are working hard to fix them.
Nice bonus can be easy to use the animate tool at www.windy.com/animate, that will create a shareable video for your news server or a social account (works only on a desktop computer). Use the video as you wish, just do not forget to add a clickable link to Windy.com.
A lot of people worked on this big feature: I, personally, have bootstrapped CSS classes, Milan, our webGL guru created front end player. But most of the work (approx 80%) was done on the backend. Importing, transformations, delivery. Tomas, Martin, Jakub a Jindra did the job.
Enjoy satellite and stay safe.
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Is this by any chance...... "vertical cross section" :)
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@stitch no :-)
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and here it comes.....now for my sulky face :-(
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@stitch Do not be sad, cross section will be soon (it is almost finished, just some UI glitches are missing), but this is even bigger thing with higher priority :-) You will love it!
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And it is on!!!!
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WOW that's awesome!!!
THANKS to Ivo, Milan, Tomas, Martin, Jakub, Jindra, and all of the Windy Team!
WINDY is everywhere :)
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@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 ? -
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. -
Great idea to add animated clouds satellites! Well done, keep up the good work, we appreciate your work and love you very much!
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@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.
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@TZ
is there a color scale? e.g. blue < -20C, red < -30C etcIt would be great if the picker shows (cloud top) temperature
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Love the idea. I know it can only improve as it goes through Beta stage testing.
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It's really fabulous !! This addition is huge, congratulations to the team !
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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
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Simply Fantastic
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@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) -
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.
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@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. -
@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 ...
