Meteorology Posts


Seeing the Clouds with the Cloud

If you follow AWS closely, you may have heard about a niche product launch a few years back called Ground Station which lets you rent, well, a ground station (basically a big antenna plus supporting equipment to communicate with satellites). A friend recently linked me an AWS blog post with a sample use case which described using it as a way of receiving real time imagery from orbiting weather satellites. Now funny enough, receiving data from polar orbiting weather satellites has been a side project of mine for over a decade now, but living in NYC has put a bit of a hold on it. I used to have a home-built QFH antenna which I used to receive images with a surprisingly high success rate given the janky construction of it.

Weather Explorer

I’m happy to say I’m finally opening up “Weather Explorer”, a project I’ve been working on in my spare time for the past two years.

Nbsp

For the past five years or so, I’ve been looking to find a way to get streaming weather data pushed to me. Originally I had wanted level 2 RADAR products to create my own composites/renders, however I couldn’t find a good source that would push it to me, and even if I could, I didn’t have the capacity to handle processing all of that data in realtime. The IEM makes level 2 data available over HTTP, and grabbing individual files as I needed them to experiment was good enough at the time.