Geo2Grid Software Package

The Geo2Grid software utility provides the capability to create high quality single band and combined Red/Green/Blue (RGB) image files in an easy and efficient manner from geostationary imager data files.

Output images are written in GeoTIFF format, which can be displayed in typical image viewers but contains extra georeferencing information that can be used in geo-spatially aware applications.

Images can optionally be reprojected to a pre-defined or user-defined grid.

Supported satellites and instruments:

  • GOES-16 and GOES-17 Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI)
  • Himawari-8 Advanced Himawari Imager (AHI) (both HSD and HimawariCast formats)

The following images can be created:

  • Single band
  • True color
  • Natural color
  • Airmass (ABI only)
  • Ash (ABI only)
  • Dust (ABI only)
  • Fog (ABI only)
  • Night microphysics (ABI only)

 

 

 

Example Geo2Grid mp4 animation

Other important features of Geo2Grid Software

  • True and natural color imagery creation includes:
    • Upsample and sharpen composite bands to the highest spatial resolution (500m).
    • Creation of pseudo “green” band for the ABI instruments.
    • Reflectance adjustment (dividing by cosine of the solar zenith angle).
    • Removal of atmospheric Rayleigh scattering (atmospheric correction).
  • All ABI Imager sectors and modes are supported.
  • Latitude/longitude subsetting.
  • Combined daytime/nighttime RGBs.
  • Overlaying borders, coastlines, etc.
  • Creating animations from the output GeoTIFF files.
  • Thorough documentation, examples, and verification data provided.

Minimum System Requirements

  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support (2+ cores - 2.4 GHz),
  • 16 GB RAM (minimum),
  • CentOS 6 (or other compatible 64-bit Linux distribution),
  • 5 GB disk space (minimum).

System Requirements for Multi-Band Real-time Processing

  • Intel or AMD CPU with 64-bit instruction support (20+ cores - 2.4 GHz),
  • 46 GB RAM (minimum),
  • CentOS 6 (or other compatible 64-bit Linux distribution),
  • 1 TB disk space (minimum for ~1 week of images, does not include long-term storage)

Creation of the images is carried out by simple bash shell script commands, which wrap underlying Python code. By default, images of all Imager Bands plus true and false color output image files will be generated, however, users can choose to create one or more band images using optional arguments.

The software uses the number of specified CPU threads to create high quality reprojections in the lowest latency possible thanks to the use of the Dask python library. Dask splits data arrays into multiple “chunks” and processes them in parallel.

 

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