Whether you caught Monday's solar eclipse from the totality zone, from your back yard, on the Internet, or skipped the whole thing, you might find a couple of things folks at Unidata have put together interesting. A big plus: no driving or traffic jams involved!
GOES-16 Imagery in the IDV
If you've got a copy of Unidata's Integrated Data Viewer (IDV) version 5.4 installed, you can see a bundle put together by Unidata's Tom Yoksas. The bundle will load the 40 CONUS images from GOES-16 that span the eclipse transit. The enhancement attempts to accentuate the moon's shadow while still allowing the 255 level grayscale to show clouds over the NASA Blue Marble with transparency for the least bright regions.
To view the bundle, select eclipse20170822 from the Climate submenu of the Bundles menu. This is a “zidv” bundle that includes the data you'll be viewing, so the IDV will ask you where to write the data file (the default, “Write to temporary directory,” should be fine.)
You'll need to have IDV 5.4 to see this bundle; you can download it from the IDV page.
MetPy Animations
Unidata's John Leeman put together a couple of animations of of temperature change and visible imagery from the eclipse using the MetPy package of Python utilities:
- 1 hour surface temperature change from ASOS stations during the 2017 solar
eclipse.
https://youtu.be/VRSReIR2Ig8 -
Watch the shadow cross the US during the 2017 eclipse. (Note that GOES 16 is non-operational
— all data are preliminary and undergoing testing/calibration.)
https://youtu.be/okm_b3iBnoI
Next week's MetPy Monday blog posting will feature these animations and the code used to create them.
