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twitterI created geoSatView back in 2018 to visualize fires on the West Coast of the United States. This entry briefly discusses geoSatView along with providing example videos and links to the code.
Back in late 2018 there was a series of fires raging across California (see 2018 California wildfires). To help visualize the resulting smoke, I created an R script, now known as geoSatView, to crawl through NOAA's public GEOS-16 database, download the images, crop to an area around California and the Bay Area, and then output a movie with these cropped views along with a time stamp. This allowed easy visualization both of the smoke's spread along with getting a sense of the fluid dynamics of the fires' smoke and how it depended on changing weather and wind conditions.
With the advent of the historic 2020 California wildfires, I've made various upgrades to geoSatView, e.g. switching to GEOS-17 as it has a much nicer view of the west coast of the United States including the Pacific Ocean, allowing "fast-forwarding" through nighttime portions, and a small GUI to make it easier for users to run. In addition, I added support for Zoom Earth using the webshot package in R. One reason for this was to easily also have fire locations on the map in lieu of downloading and incorporating them myself into the GEOS-17 data, something I will leave for future iterations. Lastly, while the magick R package can be used write out videos, this requires loading/reading all of the images into R and then saving them to a video file. This is done much more efficiently and quickly by creating a text file with a list of all relevant images then using ffmpeg with the appropriate flags, so I added that as an alternative option for users with ffmpeg on their systems (which should be everyone...).
In general these changes, along with other re-factoring of the code, make geoSatView more usable and versatile going forward. Additional features and updates forthcoming.
The code to run in R can be found below:
The data that was used for the animations can be found at the below URLs. Note that those NOAA GEOS websites only make available recent data, hence geoSatView needs to be run ever couple of days if you want to get a week(s)-long animation.
- https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/sector.php?sat=G16§or=psw
- https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus.php?sat=G17
- https://zoom.earth/#view=44,-140.6,5z/date=,-7/layers=fires
geoSatView videos
Below are animations for prior videos made using geoSatView. Mainly focused during times of fires flaring up along the west coast of the United States.
West Coast Fires as of 2020-09-18
NOAA (Sept. 7-18th, 2020)
Zoom Earth (Sept. 2-18th, 2020)
2019-10-28 California Fires
2018-11-11 California Fires
geoSatView gifs
West Coast Fires as of 2020-09-13
NOAA
Zoom Earth
2020-09-11 West Coast Fires
2020-08-19 California Fires
2019-10-28 California Fires
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