Any idea what the guy in the middle's job is? Looks like he watches an instrument and pulls a lever based on what he observes. Seems like something that could be automated!
New York Times' ability to display data, information and stories visually on the internet is truly a wonderful standard to see.
I really enjoyed the layout of this page, where the world sits, how the colors in the background don't take away from the effect from the day/night transitions. It is just wonderful.
NYT is just generally excellent when it comes to online news media, the one other paper I can think of that comes close is The Guardian but NYT's visualisations are a class of their own.
It's nice to see that folks are enjoying this — it was a group effort to wrestle the 22.3 gigs of imagery frames over FTP and get them cropped, processed, overlaid and sorted in time.
It would be really awesome to have this as wallpaper on a 4K monitor and have it update every 15 minutes. Is there a fixed URL to the most recent image?
Note that even though its 2712x2712 pixels, that's still way smaller than GOES16's potential resolution. The highest rez versions of this image that I've encountered go over 10,000 by 10,000...
Depends the way you look at it. The final data is generally available within a couple minutes, but the data itself is not collected instantaneously. At least for the full-disk scenes, the collection takes 11 minutes so the top of the image is captured 11 minutes before the bottom.
I wondered specifically why both planes were prop driven (seems like a jet engine would have more thrust and you wouldn't have to worry about wind forces on the props) and I found this, hopefully it helps with your question as well.
Wow, just wow. I didn't realize there finally are more cameras that can provide this image quality in space, beyond the one that is (was?) on the ISS. Also kudos to NYT for the way they put it together. I'm mesmerized by the globe video.
I was armchair-wondering what would have happened if North Korea would have tested their H-bomb in the eye of a hurricane instead, but I found this old broken HN post: [1]. It turns out not to be a good idea. Who would have thought? :)
On the other hand, I'm still curious if a "directed" explosion (i.e., not radial but say with only an x-component) could accomplish something.
PS: It is a pity that the early formation of the hurricanes is not visible in the video.
If you scroll down and look at South America, it's pretty remarkable how the clouds clearly carve out the Andes mountain range. All the swirling moisture from the southern Pacific smashes into the wall of the mountains and breaks apart, save for squirts that get through some of the valleys to the other side. I lost 10 minutes staring at all the details... really cool viz.
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[ 0.20 ms ] story [ 19.4 ms ] thread> In a NOAA reconnaissance mission, a plane flew through the eye wall to gather data on the storm, recording winds of 139 miles per hour at sea level.
I don't know who the pilot is for this but he's got bigger balls than me.
https://youtu.be/a-SnxC-BkPo - Short documentary segment on the NOAA team
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dropsonde
[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/f5/79/e9/f579e91f79ac79d91dc0...
I really enjoyed the layout of this page, where the world sits, how the colors in the background don't take away from the effect from the day/night transitions. It is just wonderful.
For anyone who wants to dig deeper, the RAMMB branch of NOAA in Colorado maintains a page of GOES16 loops of the day: http://rammb.cira.colostate.edu/ramsdis/online/loop_of_the_d...
... and also runs a fancy imagery viewer where you can play around with different micrometer wavelength bands: http://rammb-slider.cira.colostate.edu/?sat=goes-16&sec=full...
That said, the raw data is available through an S3-compatible service, here: https://osdc.rcc.uchicago.edu/noaa-goes16
With documentation about how to navigate and use the files here: http://edc.occ-data.org/goes16/getdata/
So it would be possible to script together something that cooks out a nice high-rez full disc image every 15 minutes.
For fun, here's one of the full disc frames we cropped in from:
https://d1ax1i5f2y3x71.cloudfront.net/items/0J2g1S1y2f2D1y0W...
Note that even though its 2712x2712 pixels, that's still way smaller than GOES16's potential resolution. The highest rez versions of this image that I've encountered go over 10,000 by 10,000...
What kind of planes can safely fly through a storm like this? Or is the eye a lot safer to go through?
Inside the eye can be calm, but the highest winds, wind shear, tornadoes, rainfall, and hail, are in the eye wall.
https://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/columnist/cox/2016/05/...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QCJlBDAK80
The performance jump in capture time and resolution blew me away. Really exciting to see it coming on-line.
On the other hand, I'm still curious if a "directed" explosion (i.e., not radial but say with only an x-component) could accomplish something.
PS: It is a pity that the early formation of the hurricanes is not visible in the video.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=698754