Open-weather’s first newsletter
Open-weather’s first newsletter
Three new tools – now online
Dearest friends, colleagues, and weather conspirators,
We – Soph Dyer and Sasha Engelmann – write from the wake of Typhoons Yagi and Krathon, Storm Boris, and Hurricanes Helene and Milton; while feeling, still, the consequences of anomalous heat stress in Summer 2024.
As part of her recent internship with open-weather, Lotti Jones responds to satellite imagery of Storm Boris and asks: “which bodies are exposed? Who is weathering more resiliently than others? How is crisis durational and bound to long social histories?”
While holding Lotti’s important questions in our minds, our first newsletter turns to the design of tools and infrastructure, which, for us, are always bound up in our observations and sensing of weather. Over the past year, together with Rectangle Studio, we have been quietly at work building new infrastructure for NOAA weather satellite imagery decoding, sharing and archiving. Beyond the technical, we have made important changes in design, and expanded possibilities for sharing images, textual ‘weather notes’ and ‘words for climate’ in our volunteer-led Public Archive.
In this first of an upcoming series of newsletters, we want to share these tools with you: what have we built? How can you make use of these tools? What new ways of sharing satellite imagery, images and weather notes are now possible?
Satellite Imagery Decoder
Many of you will be familiar with our satellite imagery decoder, open-weather apt, from its launch in 2022. Open-weather apt is the only public, maintained, browser-based decoder for Automatic Picture Transmissions (APT) from satellites NOAA-19, NOAA-18 and NOAA-15. It was developed to improve access to satellite signal decoding for all practitioners.
We are excited to share a new and improved version available here! The new version includes the following updates and additional features:
Improved accuracy in decoding and finding sync positions (locates more sync positions than other comparable decoders)
Upload a WAV file of any sample rate (no more re-sampling with Audacity!)
Option to see the ‘raw’ image without syncing, and to ‘Find the Syncs’
Option to Rotate 180 degrees, often useful for viewing images from nighttime passes
Go deeper in your analysis: explore Signal Value and Image Value Histograms
Upload directly from open-weather apt to the Public Archive
Open-weather apt is co-developed with Rectangle (Lizzie Malcolm and Dan Powers), Bill Liles (NQ6Z) and Grayson Earle. We have had a lot of fun testing and experimenting over the last year. Please let us know if you have feedback!
Public Archive
The open-weather Public Archive is now free of Google Sheets. Our new, redesigned archive is hosted on Greenhost and supported by servers powered only with renewable energy.
Significant updates to the archive include:
New visual design featuring satellite images as well as additional media and weather notes
Option to filter by ‘ground station type’ ‘nowcast’ or ‘satellite’
Option to filter by ‘contributor’ via a drop down list. Please contact us if you would like your name added to the contributor list.
Option to ‘Download Public Archive’ data in a CSV file (however please consult our Data MOU for any uses of the data)
Contributor Form
In our previous software stack, all contributions to the open-weather Public Archive happened via a basic Google Form. Our new Contributor Form is hosted on Greenhost and entirely free from Google.
We made several updates to the form to shorten its length and improve access, including:
Automatically calculating UTC time from local time (this means no more manual calculations, and also that people living further away from the ‘prime meridian’ are not disadvantaged)
Streamlining uploads of WAV files and documentation photos
Maintaining option to add ‘weather notes’ to accompany satellite images
We also added an optional question on ‘words for climate’. Contributors are invited to share up to three words that reflect their local experience of climate. These ‘words for climate’ will appear at the top of the Public Archive, as a growing lexicon of vernacular phrases and vocabularies of the climate crisis.
The Public Archive and Contributor form were designed and developed in close collaboration with Rectangle.
We are interested in your experience of the archive, decoder, contributor form, please let us know how it works for you!
In upcoming newsletters, we will share more about the new, unfolding phase of open-weather (Year of Weather) and how to take part; our project to prototype Automatic Ground Stations that automatically track NOAA satellites, receive and upload images around the world; and upcoming exhibitions!
Sending warm wishes on 137 MHz,
Open-weather
For more information about upcoming workshops, talks, and how to take part, see the latest activities on our website.