Group for Earth Observation

The Independent Amateur Quarterly Publication for
Earth Observation and Weather Satellite Enthusiasts

June 2016
Inside this issue . .
In this landmark 56-page
50th edition, Mike Stevens
sets the ball rolling with anessay on his lifetime’s
hobby, detailing his
adventures from the earlydays of APT satellite
imaging to EUMETCast.
We also have a wellresearched article from
Robert C Masur on‘Geospatial Information
Technologies’, and its
application to, among otherthings, oceanography,
climatology andmeteorology.
We also take a look at
imagery from the final few
orbits of the Russian
Meteor-M1 satellite, which
totally lost its stabilisation,
leading to images like theone shown here, which
includes the sun.
Following the widespread
displays of Nacreous Cloud
over Europe last spring, Les
Hamilton has produced anillustrated article about
these rare cloud
phenomena.
And as usual, there is ahost of articles from NASA’s
Earth Observatory website
dealing with such varied
topics as icebergs calved by
the Nansen Ice Shelf, andspringtime snow over the
Alps. There is also an
illustrated report from ESA
on the new Sentinel 1B
satellite.

GEO MANAGEMENT TEAMLes Hamilton

Director and Public Relations
Francis Bell,
Coturnix House, Rake Lane,
Milford, Godalming, Surrey GU8 5AB,
England.
Tel:
01483 416 897
email: francis@geo-web.org.uk
General Information
John Tellick,email: information@geo-web.org.uk
GEO Quarterly Editor
Les Hamilton,
8 Deeside Place,
Aberdeen AB15 7PW, Scotland UK.
email: geoeditor@geo-web.org.uk
GEO Quarterly Despatch
Peter Green
Membership and Subscriptions
David Anderson,
35 Sycamore Road,
East Leake, Loughborough LE12 6PP,
England, UK.
email: members@geo-web.org.uk
Tel:01509 820 067
Technical Consultant (Hardware)David Simmons
email: tech@geo-web.org.uk
Webmaster and Website Matters
Alan Banks,e-mail: webmaster@geo-web.org.uk
GEO Shop Manager
Nigel Evans (Assistant: David Simmons),
email: shop@geo-web.org.uk
International Liaison
Rob Denton,
email: liaison@geo-web.org.uk
Management Committee Members
Clive Finnis
Carol Finnis

Publisher
Published by The Group for Earth
Observation Limited, a company in Englandand Wales, limited by guarantee and nothaving share capital.
The Company Number is 4975597.
The registered office is Coturnix House,
Rake Lane, Milford, Godalming,
Surrey GU8 5AB, England.
Printing (December Issue)
Hedgerow Print,
16 Marsh Lane,
Crediton, Devon EX17 1ES.
Tel: 01363 777 595
Responsibility
Every effort is made to ensure that thetechnical and constructional articles
published in this Quarterly are correct.
However, the ultimate responsibility iswith the reader to ensure the safety of
constructions and for any interfacing withother equipment. GEO cannot accept liability
for shortcomings in any published design or
any constructions carried out by members orother third parties.
Copyright GEO © 2016
The contents of this Quarterly remain theintellectual property of the Group for Earth
Observation Limited and its contributors.
Copying of text or images, either from theprinted Quarterly or from any electronicallystored source, is forbidden without
permission from the Editor.

geoeditor@geo-web.org.uk

T

his GEO Quarterly magazine is a landmark issue: our50th. Much has changed since the Launch Issue in early
2004, just a couple of months after the first Meteosat Second
Generation satellite (MSG-1) commenced routine operations
as Meteosat-8. In those days, transmissions were received
using a simple Skystar PCI DVB receiver expansion card.

A

nd how fortunate, in retrospect, that Meteosat-8 sufferedan early failure of its solid state power amplifier, bringing
to an end direct dissemination of its data: for out of thismisfortune, EUMETCast was born, the system now used so
widely by the majority of GEO members to access satellite
images from around the world.

G

EO was very much the brainchild of Francis Bell,who has worked tirelessly since 2003 to promote ourorganisation with user groups and agencies around theworld. Undoubtedly the highlights have been the numerous
Symposia he organised here in the UK, and particularly thethree trips he arranged for GEO members to EUMETSAT HQ
in Darmstadt, and to the ESOC facility nearby. We all owe
Francis a huge debt of gratitude.

W

hat will the next 50 issues bring? Whatever it is, wewish you well for the future, and hope you enjoy thisspecial issue.
Copy deadline for the September issue of
GEO Quarterly is Sunday, August 28, 2016.

Contents
GEO Report and Symposium Overview
Cover Image Details
Weather Satellites: A Hobby to Enjoy
Quarterly Question
What a Difference a Day Makes
Wayward Meteor M1 Images the Sun
Spring Snow Cover in the Alps
Sudden Colour Change on Lake Kivu
Introduction to Geospatial Information Technologies
Oresund Bridge
Sentinel-1B Delivers
Total Solar Eclipse over Pacific Ocean
Mother-of-Pearl Cloud
WXtoImg Upgrade Keys now available Free
Nansen Ice Shelf sheds huge Icebergs
Is the Ocean Melting the Ice: NASA’s OMG Mission
Better than Good (Sentinel-3 Imagery)Transit of Mercury
2015 was the Hottest Year on Record
Satellite Status
GEO Helplines and Internet Discussion Groups
GEO Membership Application FormGEO Shop Catalogue and Price List

Francis Bell
Mike Stevens
Francis BellLes Hamilton/David Taylor
Les Hamilton
NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Earth Observatory
Robert C Masur
NASA/Asterweb
ESA
John Tellick
Les Hamilton
Les Hamilton
NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Earth Observatory
ESA
Robert C Masur
NASA Earth Observatory

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Francis BellIt is with great satisfaction that I acknowledge the 50th
publication of GEO Quarterly and offer my congratulations
to all who have contributed to its content in the past. A
very special thank-you to Les Hamilton who has been our
editor for almost every issue. Of course we acknowledge
the current difficulties maintaining the scale of theQuarterly because of lack of relevant contributions, which
is probably related to the rapid availability of technicalinformation via the Internet: however, our Quarterly is stillvalued by many of our members and impresses casual
readers—so long may publication continue.

reception. This was followed by Francis Bream, who
presented a technical analysis of EUMETCast data beyond
the normal image transmissions. I’m still on a learning
curve on this aspect of data analysis!

Copernicus
From my amateur perspective I am trying to follow ESA’s
Copernicus programme with its Sentinel satellites. I
am trying to come to terms with challenging new data
rates from EUMETCast’s High Volume Service, which isnecessary to accommodate these new data streams. Thisis a dimension all of us will all have to come to teams within order to receive this new data. The occasional images
processed and distributed by ESA are often stunning.
Any member with experience or advice on this subject
please write an article or something informative and send
it to our editor as this hat the potential to benefit all our
membership.

Dr Hartmut Boesch from Leicester University’s Space Science
Department discussed the importance of Earth observation for science.

Symposium 2016 Report
The GEO Symposium held at the NSC Leicester on
April 23 proved, as in the past, to be an excellent event,with several informative formal presentations plus theopportunity for members to meet with each other andexchange ideas and experiences. It proved to be a busy day
from about 9.00 am till the end of the AGM at 5.00 pm.
Delegates preparing to receive live voice transmissions
from Tim Peake on the ISS. Hand tracking the antenna
provided about seven minutes of clear reception.

Nicholas Coyne, a dissemination engineer from EUMETSAT,
giving his illustrated presentation relating to Sentinel image data.

Our speakers from EUMETSAT and Leicester University
were outstanding, plus two direct contributions from ourown members. There were three Skype sessions, two with
our member in Scotland and one with a member speaking
from ESOC Germany. There was a lunchtime bonus oflistening to Tim Peake’s live transmissions from the ISS.
Two of our members had provided equipment to facilitate
reception of these live signals.
The afternoon programme included a presentation fromRob Alblas, who had travelled from the Netherlands to bewith us. He talked about specific issues of EUMETCast

2

GEO member Francis Breame presenting his analysis of aspects
relating to EUMETCast data beyond the regular transmitted images.

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A slight digression from technical issues was the playing ofa five minute extract from a BBC TV programme recently
shown on BBC’s One Show. It featured Francis Bell with
two of his ‘old boys’ from the Royal Grammar School,
Guildford, contacting Helen Sharman, past cosmonautaboard Mir. The programme was in celebration of the 25th
anniversary of Helen Sharman’s time on the Mir spacestation, but also included a live contact between the RGS
boys and Tim Peake on the ISS.

GEO Quarterly No 50

Selected Slides from Nick Coyne’s Presentation

A screen-shot from the BBC’s ‘One Show’ programme, which featured
Francis Bell, together with two ‘old boys’ from his school, talking toHelen Sharman. The event was in recognition of 25 years since Helen
Sharman’s flight on the Mir space station.

Helen Sharman talking to Francis Bell and Royal Grammar
School ‘old boys’ during the BBC ‘One Show’.

The feedback I have received relating to the symposiumfrom the speakers and delegates has all been very positive.
Note that, because only 25 members attended thesymposium, the GEO MT decided not to charge for the
event. In any case, the money raised would not havecovered the costs involved in hiring the accommodation
with its excellent technical support. It was recognised thatthe costs would be covered by GEO funds.
The GEO MT had a separate meeting at lunch time. During
this meeting we discussed a potential new framework
for GEO membership which included ideas for freemembership using only electronic communication plus
the suggestion for a two year membership maintaining thepresent subscription at £15. We also noted Nigel Evans’comments about the future of the GEO Shop, with sales
now almost exclusively for SR1 DVB receivers.
I have copies of the PowerPoint presentations fromEUMETSAT, Leicester Space Centre, Rob Albas and David
Taylor. These are available for download from the GEO
website at
http://www.geo-web.org.uk/symposium2016.php
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Selected Slides from Hartmut Boesch ’s Presentation

David Taylor’s Presentation
David Taylor addressed the Symposium via Skype. One of his slides (below) showed the configurationof his own EUMETCast system, which is sure to be of interest to many readers..

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the new EUMETCast data format.

GEO Members AGM, April 23, 2016
This meeting took place at the National Space Centre Leicester
at approximately 4.00 pm, with Francis Bell in the chair. In theabsence of a secretary, Robert Coombs volunteered to take theminutes.
1 Francis Bell, as director of GEO Ltd., reported that the legal
requirement of the company structure and accounts were
kept up-to-date with Companies House. The cost of runningthe company is only £13 a year and Francis does all theadministration for this. Mrs Nadine Bell remains company
secretary.
2 The accounts: Two notices relating to GEO’s accounts
covering the past 15 months had been on display during
the symposium day, and members had the opportunity toinspect these figures. It was noted that, as of the end of
March 2016, the balance in the accounts were
• Membership Account £3,183• Shop Account £14,285.
The meeting unanimously agreed that the accounts were atrue and accurate record of GEO’s financial affairs.
3 Membership Report: A notice giving details of GEO’s
current membership had been on display during the day.
The notice showed that current membership is• UK 152• Europe 77• Rest of world 31
a total membership 260. The membership secretary was
thanked for his time spent on the group’s behalf.
4 The Editor’s Report. Again, this report had been on
the notice board during the day but, as a reminder, thechairman read the report to the meeting. The main issue
raised in the report related to the lack of copy being
received for publication, making it difficult to produce a
regular worthwhile paper Quarterly. It was recognised thatelectronic publications may be more realistic.
5 Shop Report: Nigel Evans had reported earlier in the daythat the shop’s stock was very limited and mainly consistedof SR1 receivers with about 40+ being in stock now.
Turnover is now so slow that the stock of SR1 is not likely
to be replaced. In his absence Nigel and Michele werethanked for their diligence in running the shop, particularly
for the SR1 sales, because without such a service many
GEO members would have struggled to buy a receiver for

Front CoverThis unusual image was transmitted by Meteor M1 on March 20,
2016, shortly after the satellite suffered a catastrophic loss ofstabilisation. This frame transmitted by the rapidly tumblingsatellite was captured by Dutch weather satellite enthusiast‘Happysat’, and shows the sun at lower left as the craft travelledsouth over Scandinavia.
Image: Alex/Happysat, Netherlands

Inside Front CoverThis image of Storm Katie, which swept across the British Isles inthe early hours of March 28, 2016, then spent the day ravaging
The Netherlands, comes from a Meteosat Image acquired by Mike
Stevens at 11.30 UT that day. This storm generated winds inexcess of 100 miles per hour (160 kph) over parts of southern
England and prompted the Dutch weather bureau to issue a code

6 There was an open discussion which lasted for about
25 minutes, relating to the future format of GEO
membership. It was noted that the cost of running electronic
only membership of GEO would be very small hence
no membership fee would be needed. A regular GEO
newsletter could be published on the web site and usergroup forums. It was noted that one of the GEO usergroups has 820 recorded visitors.
Discussion continued, with many members contributing theirideas. Support was expressed for three electronic Quarterly
publications with an additional paper copy once a year. It wasnoted how many members enjoyed and admired the printed
Quarterly. Those members of the Management Team present
acknowledged the discussion and the ideas put forward. It wassuggested that GEO could widen its interest areas and further
topics could be included in the Quarterly. It was suggested that
GEO should try to involve more educational establishments tobe active in GEO’s interest areas, and an article in the Times
Educational Supplement might be worthwhile.
The meeting closed with a statement from the chair that all the
discussions that had taken place would be considered carefullyby the Management Team.
The meeting closed at 5.00 pm.
Since the symposium the management team has confirmedthat for the foreseeable future membership will be for two
years with a subscription of £15. The rationale behind
this decision being the reduced costs of a posted printed
Quarterly only once a year the other Quarterlies being
electronic, other benefits of membership remain unchanged.
Future Events
GEO will be represented at the AMSAT-UK colloquium on July
29-31, 2016, which will be held at the Holiday Inn Guildford. For
further details visit the website
www.amsat.org.uk
GEO will again have a stand at the South London Radio andComputer Fair held at Kempton on Sunday November 13, 2016.
For details visit the website
www.radiofairs.co.uk

yellow storm warning for all parts of the Low Countries where
coastal winds of 110 kph were recorded.
Image © EUMETSAT 2016

Inside Back CoverThis section from a Metop-B pass was acquired by Mike Stevens
on April 17, 2014. The scene stretches from Svalbard in the northto the English Channel, and shows the North Sea area enjoyinga brief ridge of High Pressure either side of unseasonable wintry
blasts from the Arctic.
Image © EUMETSAT 2016

Back CoverThis beautiful image covering Scandinavia and The Netherlands
comes from the 08.57 UT pass of Meteor M2 on April 21, 2016.

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Image: Les Hamilton

5GEO Quarterly No 50

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Mike Stevens G4CFZ.
Well that’s a statement for a start: ‘A hobby to enjoy’. It
can be pure frustration at times, full of joy at others; it
can drives you to distraction and test your brain power to
its limit; but it’s so rewarding when everything finally falls
into place and you see those first images appear on yourscreen. What a feeling of elation and success! So how did it
all begin for me?
I was talking to a work colleague and he mentioned ahobby he was into at the time: weather satellite reception.
I was so fascinated with what he was telling me that hegave me some tips on where to start. One subject that
kept coming up was reception of APT (Automatic Picture
Transmission) from NOAA Polar Orbiting Satellites. The
equipment was available from two companies, Dartcom
in Devon and Timestep—then based in Newmarket—so
I promptly ordered all the kit I required and awaited its
arrival.
I carefully unpacked all the kit, crossed dipole antenna,
receiver and, of course, all the connecting cables andFigure 2 - A typical NOAA-14 infrared image processed with WXtoImg

assembled everything. I erected the antenna about four
metres off the ground, made all the connections to my
E-Machine Computer, then had to find some software toconvert the radio signals received from the satellites into
images.
The first step was to use a program called WXSat, which
demodulated the audio signals transmitted by thesatellites and stored the data as WAV files. Although thissoftware could also produce images from this data, it was
not long before I came across David Taylor’s excellent
programmes for satellite hobbyists, which at this stage
meant WXtrack to predict when the satellites were in range,
and SatSignal to decode the images (figure 1).

Figure 1 - A typical NOAA 14 image processed with SatSignal

6

I still use Wxtrack today as it is an excellent satellite
tracking program that gives all the times and passes of
the relevant satellite you are tracking. In my case, in thoseearly days, it was NOAA-14, and I will never forget thatfirst pass over my location with its tick-tock signal comingfrom the receiver and the picture it produced. It wasamazing. A new world had suddenly opened up in front of

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me.
The next piece of software I purchased was WXtoImg,
written by Craig Anderson from New Zealand, a very
interesting program which had the advantage of
demodulating the incoming signals and creating theimages in a single step. WXtoImg (figure 2, 3) gave a lot

Figure 4 - A typical WEFAX image showing west Africa

Figure 3 - A NOAA-14 multispectral image processed with WXtoImg

more detail on precipitation and complemented SatSignal,
but both were exceedingly good.
Polar Orbiter reception with the American NOAA
Satellites continues to this day following launches of
NOAAs 15/16/17/18/19, each bringing better quality
pictures as their systems advanced. Although some ofthese satellites have been decommissioned over the years,
NOAAs 15, 18 and 19 are still giving excellent pictures
to this day. But now everyone has better equipment,in particular stronger and faster computers, and many
enthusiasts now receive large quantities of high-resolution
data from a system called EUMETCast, about which, morelater.
In the past few years, some new Polar Orbital RussianSatellites, the Meteor Class have appeared on the scene,and started to arouse the interest of home users back to
direct reception of data. With up to date equipment andsoftware, Meteor M2 is causing a lot of excitement amonghobbyists at the moment and producing excellent Imagesof our Earth. I have not progressed into that direction as I
have other interests to occupy my time, one being learning
to get to grips with Windows‑10, but that’s another story.
So, moving on, I next started to explore WEFAX (Weather
Facsimile Data), a format transmitted by the geostationary
Meteosat Satellites stationed over the Equator. Meteosat‑1
was launched in November 1977, the first of this new
generation Geostationary Satellites, and it marked thestart of a continuous high quality service for Europe andAfrica. Unfortunately, Meteosat-1 failed fairly early in its
life, and I think my earliest data would have come from
Meteosat-2, which was launched in June 1981.
As you can see from figure 4, the picture its quite different

from what we receive today, both in quality and clarity, but
it was still an achievement to obtain that kind of image atthat time, even with the low specification computers thenavailable. But it got a lot better when Windows XP came on
the scene we had a system you could work with, and still
today, many enthusiasts are reluctant to give it up. So,with the launch of the Meteosat Satellites, emerged a newera of Weather Satellite Reception. It was a whole new ball
game.
EUMETSATIn March 1983, it was decided that a new specialised
operational organisation was required to manage all
aspects of Earth-Observing satellites, and the convention
for the future EUMETSAT Organisation was agreed.
At the same time, the Member States of the European
Space Agency agreed to initiate the Meteosat Operational
Program (MOP), involving the construction of three further
satellites to be handed over to EUMETSAT. These, whichbecame known as Meteosats –4, -5 and -6, were launchedbetween 1989-1993. On November 15, 1995, control of the
Meteosat Satellites in orbit was passed over to EUMETSAT,
and Meteosat-7, the last in that series, was launchedon September 2, 1997. It says much for the technologyof that time that Meteosat‑7, moved across to cover the
Indian Ocean area in December 2005, is currently still
operational.
In May 1991 the EUMETSAT Council decided to establish
an independent ground segment to replace the systemestablished by ESA in 1977. This was the start of the
Meteosat Transition Programme (MTP), which covered
the phasing out of the MOP to the start of the Meteosat
Second Generation (MSG) programme. Meteosat-8 (MSG‑1)
was launched in 2002 but, during the testing phase,an onboard solid‑state power amplifier failed, making
it impossible to disseminate user services directly. This
caused great concern, and led to the development of asystem called EUMETCast, whereby data was relayed tousers using DVB satellite technology, a system that still
operates successfully today.
Currently EUMETSAT have three MSG Operational
Satellites, Meteosats -8, -9 and -10. The organisation

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also operates two Polar Orbiting Satellites, Metop-A andMetop-B and are cooperating with NASA and NOAA with the
Jason-1/2 and now Jason-3 Orbital satellites. They are also
cooperating with the European Space Agency (ESA), on
their Copernicus project to provide the European Union
with Earth observation data: Sentinel‑3A, launched on
February 16, 2016, is the latest Copernicus satellite.
Unlike their predecessors, which transmitted only
analogue WEFAX, the Second Generation satellites
transmit digital data. Meteosat‑10, operational since 2012,is currently the newest of the geostationary satellites,and provides full data for the entire hemisphere every
15 minutes from its SEVERI (Spinning Enhanced Visible
and Infrared Imager) instrument, and is expected toremain in service until at least 2022. Meteosat-8 remains ingood health as the back-up satellite should service from
Meteosats -9 or ‑10 be interrupted. Meteosat-9, has run the
RSS (Rapid Scan Service) since April 2013. This involves
scanning only the northern third of the hemisphere but
supplying data every five minutes. Though it has not yet
been brought into service, Meteosat‑11 is already stored inorbit until it is required by EUMETSAT.
Digital Reception
Reception of these digital satellites was the area I moved
into. The quality and quantity of data was much greaterthan before and my transition was taken care of withthe excellent, new DVB-World digital tuner, which gave
consistent results from the satellites. Perhaps mostimportant in this respect was the ever fast-moving
technology of computers. Windows XP was an amazing
operating system which performed well without too muchfuss, could be easily programmed for all the excellent
satellite related software, mainly from David Taylor. They
proved quick and easy to instal, and had you up andrunning in no time at all. I still use them to this day.
Taking what we receive today for granted, it still has tobe realised that these satellites play a very importantpart in current weather forecasting, and are there for the
primary role of detecting and forecasting developing highimpact weather such as thunderstorms and fog. They
have become vital for the safety of lives, property andinfrastructure but, as amateur weather hobbyists, we are
privileged to see all this data thanks to the co-operation of
EUMETSAT, for which I thank them.
The Metop polar orbiting satellites are producing somebrilliant images of our Planet and I have been receiving
them via EUMETCast since they were launched andcommissioned. The Metop satellites orbit the Earth once
every 101 minutes, constantly scanning the planet below.
Every few minutes, data is downloaded to EUMETSAT HQ
in Darmstadt then re-transmitted over the EUMETCast
system to the user fraternity. The image quality is excellent(one kilometre/pixel resolution, figure 5), and data files
received from both satellites can be processed using David
Taylor’s Metop Manager software.
There are two Polar Orbital Satellites operated by
NASA, named Aqua and Terra which produce even higher
resolution imagery (250 metres/pixel), and these also are
streamed via EUMETCast. The imaging device on thesesatellites if termed MODIS (Moderate-resolution imaging
spectroradiometer), and their data can be resolved using
another program from David Taylor, MODIS L1 Viewer.
Figure 6 is a typical screenshot showing MODIS L1 Viewer
in action. It’s software I use all the time: try it, and youwont be disappointed.

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Figure 5 - A Metop-1 image from October 3, 2015
Image © EUMETSAT 2015

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You will recall my mention of APT earlier. APT images
have a resolution of 4 km/pixel, Now you can receive
the High Resolution Picture Transmissions (HRPT) fromthe NOAA Satellites via EUMETCast and, using David
Taylor’s AVHRR Manager software, you will get a complete
pass which you can feed into his HRPT Reader program
to create some amazing quality pictures. My computer isrunning all the time and is so very interesting to watch thepass build the pictures (figure 7).

Figure 7 - An HRPT image being received with
AVHRR Manager via EUMETCast
Image © EUMETSAT

Well there you have it. We now have a DVB systemdelivering masses of data, not just from Europe but fromall round the world: from the USA with their GOES-E and
GOES-W, across to the Indian Ocean with Meteosat-7,
then further East from the Chinese Satellite Feng Yun‑2G,
and finally from Japan Weather Bureau’s latest Satellite,
Himawari-8, which covers a massive area from Kamchatka
in the North down to New Zealand and Antarctica. So I see
weather from all over this planet of ours, amazing, and all
can be received through the EUMETCast System.
The Envi-Ham Project
The next project to come on stream was a very interesting
one: run by ESA, it was called the Env-Ham Project, andallowed those interested, by application and invitation,
to take part to receive data and images from the Envisat
satellite. My thanks to Francis Bell, who was instrumental
in organising the project.

Figure 6 - A Modis L1 image acquired via EUMETCast
Image © EUMETSAT 2015

You first had to apply to the Envisat Team for a licence,and provided you were accepted, you then received all
the information via several emails, one of which you had
to sign and return, together with details of your station.
This enabled the DDS Team to issue you with a Site Key
and a DDS Key. Once you had received all the relevant
information you were able to start to set-up your station.
It was then I decided to replace my old beaten-up satellite
dish. Winter Storms here on the South Coast tend todamage kit very quickly, so I opted for a 1 m dish and a
Twin LNB as I intended to receive both EUMETCast andEnvi-Ham from the same dish using two separate feeds

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Figure 8 - A detailed image of the Sinai peninsula
received through the Envi-Ham project.

Figure 10 - A detailed image showing the island of Sicily
received through the Envi-Ham project.

back to the twin DVB World receivers. The adjustment wasgoing to be tricky because the EUMETCast transmissions
were from Eurobird-9 located at 9°E while the Envisat
data came from Eutelsat W1 at 10°E. Making a very fineadjustment, I was able to locate Eurobird-9 very easily as
it delivered a very strong signal. I then moved my dishapproximately 17 mm east and located Eutelsat. Bothsignals were ‘solid copy’ and, when I switched on after
all the adjustment, I found rock-steady signals and data
started to flow in.

Windows 7 was eventually followed by Windows 8.1 asystem that I currently use. This gives me very good
reliability and good satellite program processing, but I do
have one PC running the new Windows 10, which I keep avery close eye on—but so far so good.

Image: ESA

Image: ESA

To decode this data I used the software supplied by
ESA, called VISAT, and the pictures were quite stunning(figures 8, 9) and so different from those from EUMETCast,
but with even more quality and detail. It was amazing.
It was unfortunate that early in the project, the Envisat
satellite failed and has never been recovered. But I hopethat, one day, ESA may let us participate in anothersimilar project as it really was ground breaking stuff—andI still have my two DVB-World receivers just in case.

The New DVB-S2 Transmission Format
I continued to enjoy my EUMETCast experience until
rumours started to abound during 2013/2014 that
EUMETCast was to transition from DVB‑S to DVB‑S2, a
new transmission format that was required to handle theever increasing flow of satellite data through the system.
This also meant use of a new satellite, retuning and new
software. I thought: “here we go again”, and I was right.
But one of the first things that came to light when it
had been officially announced we were going to haveto change everything was the cost of the Tuners.
EUMETSAT‑approved DVB-S2 Tuners were being priced
at over £400, which at the time I thought was grossly
overpriced. Indeed, they were expensive to the point thatmany members—bearing in mind that most are retired,and like me on a limited budget—would be hard pressedto spend that amount of cash on a tuner for DVB-S2
reception.
So I went hunting for something that would be equally as
good but less expensive, and came across a company inHong Kong called TBS who manufactured DVB-S2 tuners.
These tuners could operate with the new EUMETCasttransmissions, so I contacted TBS, heralding the start of a
special cooperative relationship that has lasted to this day.

Figure 9 - A detailed image of the coast of Namibia
received through the Envi-Ham project.
Image: ESA

Windows 7
While all the above was going on we had something else
to get used to—a new Microsoft operating system called
Windows-7. It took some time to become familiar with thisas quite a few variations had to be made to the reception
system: we had to deal with firewalls, command line
operations and the use of separate Tools and Files folders
outside the Program Files folder. But, as it turned out, it
has now become a very big favourite of many users, who
prefer to remain with Windows‑7 for as long as possible.

10

I was offered to test a TBS-6925 PCIe Card, which could
be conveniently fitted into an expansion slot within thecomputer, and was delighted to accept. I was sent asample, and so the trials started. The first thing was toinstall and set-up the card, which was very easy. The
tuner started up, and when all the system parameters had
been set in Windows-7 the DVB Data came flooding in. It
was then just a case of linking in all the software to decode
the images. This proved to be an excellent tuner.
Then, in late 2014, test transmissions of the new DVB-S2
VCM service began, but unfortunately the TBS-6925 tuner
would not remain locked to the signal. Following a quick
email to TBS Support, a new set of software was sent
to me the following day, and installed. Once the PC had
been rebooted, the tuner remained locked to the DVB-S2
transmission and I was able to copy all the test files withwww.geo-web.org.uk

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Figure 11 - This Envisat image of the Aral Sea, dating from August 19, 2011 illustrates the satellite’s amazing resolution.
Image: Envi-Ham/ESA

no lock out: and it continued to perform well as soon as
the Real Time Data came on-line.
Since those early days of the new transmissions I havebeen privileged to test all the new TBS Tuners (TBS5925, -6925, -6908 and the latest TBS-6903). All thesehave worked extremely well with DVB-S2 VCM and arecontinuing to do so; and all are priced at well under the£400 mark.
Prior to this, and before the new system was underway, the satellite dish had to be repositioned towards,
coincidently, the same satellite that had been used for theEnvi-Ham project, so again a move east of about 17 mm
at the end of the LNB to obtain Eutelsat 10A at 10°E, so no
problem there.
I have to admit that, in the early days, I did experiencesome software conflicts, but with the help of othermembers and TBS Support we now have reliable tunersthat are capable of delivering the massive amount of data
to our computers, and at the moment coping well.
The Data Services
The new DVB-S2 system offers two types of data: the one
we all use, called Basic Service, that delivers the samedata we have been taking since the start of EUMETCast,and the High Volume Service. The latter has yet to bemade available, but I have already been receiving test files
with TBS-6903 without any loss of packets. However, I

am unsure as to how much data we will be able to copewith once the system goes Real Time Live. I am confident
that the tuners will cope but not sure if we will haveenough computer capability to decode all the data. Thisis unknown territory at the moment, and we must simply
wait and see.
Finally
So there you have it: a lifetime with weather satellite
reception—or so it seems. Do I still enjoy it? Hell yes!
It’s the challenges of setting a reception system up andgetting it to work, then sitting back and watching all
the amazing images explode on the computer screen.
I found the move over from Amateur Radio—with aninterest in receiving all signals—to this hobby seemed anatural progression, and like the dawn of a new age. And
sending in articles for the Quarterly helps others to enjoy
the hobby and gain experience of all the equipment andsystems.
So I hope this has given all the new members an insight
into how this hobby we love so much has progressed.
And with all the technical aspects of programming andthe computer up-grades we have also had to overcome,can see the challenges that faced us. But if you have apassion for something you will meet that challenge head
on—and win as well. So don’t be put off, remember we
had to learn as well.
Happy weather watch from Portland.

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Figure 12 - Himawari

Figure 12 - Japan’s latest geostationary satellite, Himawari-8, is one of the latest additions to the EUMETCast service.
This is a section from the image captured by the satellite at 05:30 UT on April 5, 2016.
Image © EUMETSAT 201612www.geo-web.org.uk

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Figure 13 - Meteosat-10 image acquired at 15.00 UT on March 31, 2016: Full Disc (above), British Isles section (below).
Image © EUMETSAT 2016www.geo-web.org.uk

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Francis Bell
Quarterly Question 49
My thanks to those members who emailed
me with the correct answer to the last
Quarterly Question, which related to asatellite image showing the southern tip
of South America. The main island in theimage is Tierra del Fuego (the land of fire
) which is politically divided between Chileand Argentina.
I was prompted to ask the question
because it’s part of the world which I havevisited for purely recreational reasons
with nothing political or commercial in the
background. The commercial dimension
has been important in the past because,prior to the opening of the Panama Canalon August 15, 1914, the sea passagesaround the tip of South America were vital,
providing the to only sea route between the
Pacific and Atlantic Oceans.
The port of Punta Arenas is in this region.
In the past this was an important refuellingstop for steam ships because of the local
coal mine, hence offering the opportunity
top up on coal. Interestingly, thecommercial interest in the area nowadays
is related to petroleum extraction, not coal.
The other relatively small but attractive
local port I visited was Ushuaia, which isthe capital Terra del Fuego.
I’m not sure of all the human history of
the area, which apparently goes back
8,000 years, but for commercial andgeographical reasons I can understand thepolitical and territorial ambitions of both
Chile and Argentina claiming sovereignty
over the area. The current status is thedivision of the island between these twocountries.
Quarterly Question 50
The rationale behind the idea for thisquestion was prompted by an image I
saw in the background during our recent
symposium Skype contact with MarkDrapes, who was in the central control
room at ESOC. In the background,on a large screen, there was a rolling
display of images, quite unrelated to ourSkype conversations. I was surprised torecognise one or two of the images which
I feel sure were selected from of ESA’s‘Image of the Week’. It so happens that I
have a small collection of these publishedimages, and recognised two of the series
which was being shown: one illustrated avigorous marine algal bloom, and the other14

a distinctive geological terrestrial feature.
It is this second image, reproduced
opposite, which is the subject of thisQuarterly Question.
The question is this: “Name the circularfeature shown in the image, together withany other facts and figures which you
consider to be informative about it”.
To help identify the image in question,
www.geo-web.org.uk

note that the scale is such that the major
diameter of the circular feature shown isabout 100 km. It may also help to identify
the location by knowing that most surface
water in the area is frozen during the local
winter and may well be covered in snow.
However, this image was acquired during
the summer. Answers by email please to
Francis Bell francis@geo-web.org.uk
by Sunday, August 28, 2016.

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Space:UK
The UK Space Agency distribute a very informative 26 page A4
paper publication several times a year. The publication covers
activities related to the UK space industry plus related sciences. I
always find it interesting to read and very well illustrated.
The April 2016 edition understandably covers Tim Peake’s
activities on the ISS but also covers other topics. I have followed
some of the references given in this edition and found them very
interesting.
This publication is available free of charge on request. I
suggest that, if you wish to be added to their mailing list for thispublication, you write to:
UK Space Agency ( Space:UK Publication )Polaris House
North Star Avenue
SwindonSN2 1ET
Ask to be added to their mailing list and say that you want thematerial for your own personal or educational interests. Don’t
expect a reply, but one day you may receive your copy. You could
try asking for the April 2016 to be sent to you.

The front cover of the latest ‘Space:UK ‘ publication

Algal Bloom

The Sentinel-2A satellite captured this spectacular image of the central Baltic Sea on August 7, 2015.
The image shows detail down to 10 metres across, revealing exquisite detail of an algal bloom.
Image: ESA

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Les Hamilton/David Taylor
Last March, David Taylor sent me these two NOAA-19 APT
images detailing the British Isles and western Europe.
The left-hand image, acquired on March 14, shows ahigh pressure area located over the North Sea, producing
clear skies beneath which the whole of Britain basked insunshine, at the same time deflecting Atlantic depressions
towards Iceland. Had this been summer, it would havebeen expected that the fine sunny weather would continue
for several days.

But in March the sea is cold and the warming influenceof the sun relatively weak, and overnight the temperature
dropped producing widespread swathes of fog. The
following day, gentle on-shore breezes brought yet more
fog to the eastern coasts, a situation that scarcely changed
for several days. The second image, dating from March 15
shows the situation: while the east of Britain sulked under
fog and low cloud, to the west it was sunshine every day,with temperatures in the high teens in many places.

NOAA 19 at 13:41 UT on March 14, 2016

NOAA 19 at 13:30 UT on March 15, 2016

Reception equipment: indoor QFH, RX2 receiver, WXSat wave file capture, PassControl scheduling, SatSignal-6 offline processing.

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This lovely Meteor M1 image, acquired at 07:34 UT on March 19, 2016, was sent to us from Italy by Enrico Gobbetti. Great swathes oflow cloud cover northern France and the North Sea but the snow-covered Alps, Italy and north Africa are beautifully portrayed.

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Les Hamilton

On the morning of March 20, on its 07:25 UT pass, Meteor M1 produced this remarkable image. At the time, the satellite was flying
southwards, directly down the length of the Baltic Sea then over the Alps, which can be discerned in the lower part of the image. The
craft is clearly spinning, with the Earth’s limb prominent throughout. The unusual large oval artefact in the upper section of the imageis the sun. Image captured by Les Hamilton using an RTL dongle and SDRSharp software and plugins by Vasili Beliakov.

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Image: Marquis/Moscow / 03:10 UTImage: Marquis/Moscow / 05:51 UTMarch 20 at 05:50 UT (Cesare Buzzi/Italy)

GEO Quarterly No 50

Image: Eric Knapps/Belgium / 09:09 UTMarch 20 at 09:09 UT (Walter Diego Spaltro/Uruguay)

Thanks to Alex (Happysat) for sending in a selection of images from around the world
documenting the imagery from the spinning Meteor M1 during March 20, 2016.
www.geo-web.org.uk

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This splendid image showing the British Isles, Belgium and The Netherlands almost completely cloud-free, was capturedby the NOAA‑19 satellite at 13.18 UT on April 20, 2016. Thanks to David Taylor for forwarding it to GEO Quarterly.
Image © EUMETSAT 201620www.geo-web.org.uk

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NASA Earth Observatory

Late winter storms dropped a fresh coating of snow across theAlps in mid-March 2016. The fresh powder was a welcome sightfor skiers and the many resorts that cater to them. Though springsunshine is becoming more abundant, temperatures on the upper
slopes have remained low enough to preserve the snow cover.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)on NASA’s Terra satellite acquired this nearly cloud-free imageof the Alps on March 20. The Alps, which includes 29 mountains
that exceed 4000 metres in height, stretches 1200 kilometresacross eight nations and it is the longest mountain chain situatedentirely within Europe.
Across the Alps, snow cover was late to arrive during the winterof 2015-16, and early November snowfall—the usual start of theseason—was followed by weeks of above-average temperatures.
Many locations did not see substantial snow until after New Year’Day. Weather patterns became more seasonable in January
and February, and a heavy March snowfall of between 40 and
100 centimetres in some areas gave hope to the skiing tourist
industry.
This season, as well as its predecessor, fit with the long-term
trend in the European Alps. For much of the 20th century, snow
cover increased slightly or held steady, but during the 1980s and
90s, average winter snow cover started to decrease, and winterrainfall increased at lower altitudes, a trend that has continued
into the 21st century. Though the average area covered bysnow in any given winter has not changed much, the depth andduration of the snow cover has decreased, particularly in thesoutheastern and southwestern mountains and in areas below
2000 metres altitude.
NASA image by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.
Caption by Mike Carlowicz.

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NASA Earth Observatory

April 10, 2016

April 18, 2016

In April 2016, the waters of Lake Kivu in central Africa changed
colour unexpectedly. The blue freshwater lake turned milky asviewed from boats and from space. Such a sudden change
would attract the attention of people anywhere in the world, but it
commands particular attention to those who live on the edge of alake known to harbour potentially deadly stores of gas.
Lake Kivu is one of Africa’s Great Lakes, and straddles theborder between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of theCongo. The lake is a source of drinking water and fish, as well asa transportation route, for nearly two million people.
Lake Kivu is connected to the volcanic plumbing of the East
African Rift, and there are vast stores of dissolved methaneand carbon dioxide in its depths: a concern, because otherlakes in Africa have been known to abruptly discharge gases
and suffocate people nearby. For this reason, scientists havebeen monitoring water and volcanic conditions through the Lake
Kivu Monitoring Program (LKMP), and engineers have beendeveloping a platform for extracting those gases to produce
energy and to reduce the hazard.
Augusta Umutoni, head of the LKMP, noted that her researchteam had detected seismic and volcanic activity in April, which
initially heightened concern about the lake. But it turned out that
April’s colour change was actually much less ominous. Lake Kivu
is going through a whiting event similar to those that occasionallyhappen on the Great Lakes of North America. Whiting occurs
when air and water temperatures rise—as does the pH level near

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April 20, 2016

the surface—in a lake that is rich in calcium carbonate. As thetemperature and pH rise, the carbonates start to precipitate outof the water as calcite particles that have a white or gray colour(phytoplankton blooms can also lead to whiting-like effects).
“We don’t yet know for sure what caused this particular whiting
event at Lake Kivu,” said Martin Schmid of the Swiss Federal
Institute of Aquatic Science and Technology. “It is certainly
unusually strong, but there have been similar weaker events
before. It can be caused by a phytoplankton bloom, by highsurface water temperatures, or by a combination of both.”
Mixing of surface waters with lower layers can bring up morecalcium and nutrients from the depths and promote blooms
or whiting events. Although such mixing occurs annually, theintensity of response of carbonate precipitation varies. East
African lakes are known to respond to El Niño events, and thecurrent episode may also have had an affect on the physicalprocesses in the lake.
The Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS)
instruments on NASA’s Terra and Aqua satellites peeked throughthe clouds to acquire three natural-colour images of Lake Kivu’s
whiting event, as illustrated above.
NASA images by Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS Rapid Response.
Caption by Michael Carlowicz, with image interpretation help from Cynthia Ebinger(University of Rochester), Jarmo Gummerus (ContourGlobal/KivuWatt Ltd.), andAugusta Umutoni (Lake Kivu Monitoring Program).

www.geo-web.org.uk

This fine image from Meteor M2 was posted on the GEO-Subscribers YAHOO Group on April 19, 2016 by Jim Scheffler.
Meteor’s 1 km/pixel resolution easily picks out the Manicouagan Crater and the St Lawrence Estuary in Canada, as well as
all the Great Lakes save Superior and the contorted ranges of the Apalachian mountains in the USA.

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Robert C. Mazur (va3rom@gmail.com)
Most of the information for this article was obtained from the excellent ‘Eyes in the Sky 2’ web-based Geospatial Information
Technologies (GIT) course, but other sites also provided invaluable background information. The terms ‘data’ and ‘telemetry’ areoften used interchangeably to mean the same, but technically, telemetry is data metered (measured) from a distance (remotely),
and transmitted via landline or wireless (tele) to another location. References to Google Earth (GE) mean the ‘Pro’ version which
Google Inc. has now released for free use with enhanced features not available in the ‘standard’ version.

Figure 1 - Google Earth GISThis illustrates just a few components and capabilities of GIT, combining layers of GPS tracks, waypoints, plus
photographs all layered on a GE virtual Earth, and all with realistic viewing angles and vanishing points.

Let’s ‘GIT’ Going

Global Positioning System

Geospatial Information Technologies is defined as the study of
the Earth (‘geo’) as seen from above, so you'd think that thismeans only geography, geology, or geophysics. But it's also
used in many other sciences such as oceanography, climatology,
meteorology, biology, palaeontology, archeology, forestry andhusbandry. GIT combines metering devices (hardware) withcomputer programs (software) to collect, process, analyze, andcompare various sets of data (figure 1). These ‘datasets’, inanalog and/or digital form, can come from collections of pastor present seemingly unrelated sources, such as maps, charts,
satellite images, land surveys, weather records, ground/aerial
photographs, and so on. While scientists and other professionals
may be the primary users of GIT, most of us use parts of it every
day, whether we know it or not.

Thirty-two low-earth orbiting (LEO) satellites form the
Global Navigation Satellite System (GNSS) ‘constellation’ which
continuously transmits geo-reference radio plus very accurate
date and time signals on the L-Band frequency ‘L1’ at 1575.42
megahertz (MHz) for civilian use, and on ‘L2’ at 1227.60 MHz
for military use (encrypted). The GNSS is a free to use, worldwide navigation system controlled and maintained by the UnitedStates Department of National Defense (DND). The uncorrected
positional ‘fix’ error is normally no more than ±10 metres,
but weather, terrain, vegetation, structures, radio frequency
interference (RFI), etc., can and do affect received GPS signal
quality, and therefore accuracy.

GIT has three components:
1
2
3

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Global Positioning System (GPS).
Geographic Information Systems (GIS).
Image analysis programs.

Today's smartphones use the GNSS with their built-in GPS
receivers to ‘follow’ us around, automatically recording position,
speed, altitude, direction, et al. Even if you turn off its internal
GPS (or it malfunctions), as long as your smartphone is poweredon it's still a radio ‘transponder’, surreptitiously working in the
background, sending and receiving telemetry to/from any cellwww.geo-web.org.uk

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Figure 2 - Smartphone GIT
Smartphone GPS tracking programs provide basic GIT functions using cellular systems, internal GPS, and internet mapping technology.

tower(s) within radio range (‘pinging’). Because each tower ‘knows’ Note: I've added extra spaces between items 12 and 14 forexactly where it is, it can ‘tell’ your smartphone what ‘ballpark’ it'sediting purposes only, and the actual sentences are continuousin, so it can still track (or be tracked), albeit with less accuracy.
comma separated value (CSV) alphanumeric strings:
But if your smartphone can ping two or more towers, it can use‘old school’ radio direction finding (RDF) to calculate a much moreaccurate position. We can also reverse this process, and anyone
who has ever misplaced their smartphone (or had it stolen) has
probably used a Find My Phone application, augmented with
Google Inc. internet mapping technology, to search for, andhopefully locate it.

The National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) is theregulatory body for all maritime electronic devices (including GPS)in how they communicate with each other, and these devices arecalled NMEA ‘talkers’ and/or NMEA ‘listeners’. The United Statesnavy pioneered the GPS concept, and developed its use in the
1960s (Vietnam War) with a simple, five satellite constellation
which provided positions to U.S. warships (but only once perhour).

1 Time UTC (hours, minutes, seconds, and decimal seconds)
2 Latitude (degrees, minutes, decimal minutes)
3 N or S (North or South)
4 Longitude (degrees, minutes, decimal minutes)
5 E or W (East or West)
6 GPS Quality Indicator:
0 - fix not available,
1 - GPS fix,
2 - Differential GPS fix
7 Number of satellites in view (00-12)
8 Horizontal dilution of precision (DOP) ranging from 0 to 20(< 2 is excellent)
9 Antenna altitude above/below mean sea level (geoid)
10 Units of antenna altitude (M = metres)
11 Geoidal separation, the difference between the WGS-84
Earth ellipsoid and mean sea level (geoid), "-" indicatesmean sea level below ellipsoid
12 Units of geoidal separation (M = metres)
13 Age of differential GPS data, time in seconds since last
SC104 type 1 or 9 update or null field when DGPS is not
used
14 Differential reference station ID (0000-1023)
15 Checksum (telemetry error checking)GPS communications uses NMEA ‘sentences’ containing various
GNSS telemetry, and all sentences begin with the dollar symbol($) plus ‘GP’, a left-over relic from the old IBM punch computer
card days when ‘$’ preceded various system commands ($JOB,$DATA, $END, etc.).

Unfortunately, every other GPS manufacturer also developed
their own proprietary file formats (Garmin, Magellan, et al) for
use only with their own hardware and software, making data file
exchanges between different (and very pricey, back then) GPS
receivers difficult for the average user.

Today, there are many possible sentence structures, transmitted
as a serial stream, that you can view directly, and/or save to a filefor analysis and/or data sharing, but the ‘GGA’ construct is thesentence commonly used to extract GNSS positional (and other)
information by your GPS receiver and/or software.

By the mid-1990s, with the rapid growth and widespread useof the internet, a universal method of GPS data exchange was
required with NMEA, the many proprietary formats, and internet
websites designed with HTML. This came in the form of theeXtensible Markup Language (XML), which is used to store

Smartphones have become the perfect portable grab 'n go data/
telemetry collection tool of choice for many people (figure 2), andthis 21st century digital ‘Swiss army knife’ device can do the jobs of
all the other ‘stuff’ that we lugged around in the past for emailing,talking, texting, tracking, mapping, snapping, videoing, recording,logging, etc.
What’s in a NMEA?

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Figure 3a - GPX Waypoints and Tracks Display

Figure 3b - GPX Tracks Terrain Vertical Profile Display

and transport data across the internet and different computer
operating systems and hardware, giving birth to the GPS
eXchange Format (GPX). However, in order to be truly universal,
GPX only contains the metadata (data that provides data aboutother data) required for basic mapping and plotting purposes.
Figures 3a and 3b display various GPX data in more user-friendly
visual/text formats (POIs/waypoints, tracks, and elevation profile).

GPS Reflections
Atmospheric water vapour is a ‘good’ and very important
greenhouse gas (water in invisible gaseous form) continuously
created and removed by the Water Cycle processes of
evaporation and condensation (figure 4a). It's the ‘stuff’ of alllife and weather on this planet, but it's also the least studied
and understood greenhouse gas. In the 1990s, AtmosphericRivers (AR) of water vapour (named so by Zhu and Newell)
were discovered ‘flowing’ in different ‘channels’ around the world(figure 4b); these are extremely long but narrow corridors whichcarry huge amounts of water, easily exceeding that of a dozen‘mighty’ Mississippi Rivers. Conventional radiosonde balloons(very high-flying weather balloons with telemetry transmitting/recording equipment, plus a parachute) are sent up twice
a day by world-wide stations to gather various atmosphericcharacteristics, including vapour content.
Water vapour also dramatically affects microwave radio signals
as they travel down through the atmosphere, and a network of
GPS ground stations (mostly in the United States) continuously
monitors the overhead ‘integrated precipitable water vapour’(IPW or PWV) measured in millimeters of water. The IPW is
the amount of water that would be collected in an imaginary
cylindrical cup, if it were instantly converted back to liquid form.

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Figure 4a - The Water Cycle

GEO Quarterly No 50

Figure 4b - An Atmospheric River

Courtesy NOAA.

Courtesy NOAA.

Figure 4c - Reflected GPS Signals
Special receiver sites measure any differences between direct(not reflected) and indirect (reflected) GPS signals. Bare soil
reflection establishes a reference signal (sinusoidal wave) having
a certain frequency, phase, and amplitude. When signals reflect
off snow (dashed line) the frequency changes, and off vegetation(normal moisture content) the signal is attenuated. Increased soil
moisture caused by liquid precipitation causes only a very slightsignal phase shift. Courtesy GPS Reflection Research Group.

Today, a series of specially equipped geosynchronous Earthorbiting satellites (GOES) stationed over the equator assist in
spotting and tracking AR, just like any other weather phenomena.
Strong storm systems bounce microwave signals around as
they penetrate them (GPS ‘ricochet’), and this effect is used todetermine internal wind speeds and directions—especially useful
to know for forecasters tracking ‘monster’ hurricanes. Salt water
bodies also easily reflect microwaves back into space, and thesecan be received by satellites or high flying aircraft, and analyzed
to extract oceanographic information.
Reflected GPS signals are used for analyzing the various effects
terrain, vegetation, water, snow, or ice has on them (figure 4c).
Over the past 20 years, more and more uses have been—andstill are being—discovered, including earthquake and volcano
monitoring, measuring plate tectonics, creating digital terrain
elevation models, and so on.
What's really neat and exciting is that hobbyists/students can use
inexpensive SDR dongles and free DSP software to experimentwith GPS signals using new RTL-SDR's with a built-in bias‑T
power supply (among other things) with ‘active’ [bias‑T powered]GPS ‘patch’ antennas to receive the GNSS L2 frequency.

Figure 4d - GPS-IPW Stations
Five days of overhead IPW readings collected by the
Keweenaw GPS-IPW station. We are too far apart for our IPW
numbers to match, but they are usually inside the same colour
ball range scale (bottom).
Courtesy NOAA.

Here's an interesting [classroom] experiment/project: Compare
the strengths of GPS signals received during the day, week,
month, and year as the relative humidity (RH) changes at yourlocation. RH is related to the dew point (DP) or "wet bulb"
temperature, and amazingly, your overhead column of IPW
can be roughly calculated if you know either value (Smith, andReitan IPW equations refer). A computerized personal weather
station (PWS) providing DP and/or RH is preferred over a moredistant source of weather information, but you use the tools andresources available.
To check my calculated values, I have to use a GPS-IPW
monitoring station over 100 kilometres away so there's about +/20 percent deviation between values (see Figure 4d).
Geographical Information Systems (GIS)
GIS build layered ‘sandwiches’ of separate datasets (often
seemingly unrelated) in either 2 or 3 dimensions (2D/3D) on a
virtual Earth surface (figures 1 and 5). You can select which layer
combinations you want to view, change their transparencies,
magnification (zoom) levels, viewing angles, or time of day
and/or year. You look at things from ground level, from up
high, or ‘fly’ over/under layers. But the real power of GIS isthe ability to measure/extract almost any geophysical property
such as distances, angles, areas, temperatures, intensities,
densities, sizes, and many others. GIS programs usually havelarge memory caches to download/store internet or other data
beforehand, and then you can disconnect and move to/work inareas where there may be no outside data access. Popular GIS
include: Google Earth and ArcGIS for ‘general purpose’ use,www.geo-web.org.uk

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Digital Atmosphere for meteorology, and Depiction for disasterplanning.
The KML Cometh
A GIS company called Keyhole Inc. created an XML variant
called the Keyhole Markup Language (KML) because GPX
didn't have the capabilities required to store non-GPS related
metadata (images, web links, view angles, etc.), and KML
became the ‘backbone’ of Keyhole's Earth View GIS. During
Gulf War II (2003), it entered the limelight when the major news
networks used Earth View to broadcast near real-time, 3D colour,
high resolution animations of allied military actions (a common
practice pioneered by CNN). Shortly thereafter, Google Inc.
bought Keyhole Inc., and Earth View was renamed Google Earth.

June 2016

Fortunately, you don't need to know how to ‘read’ or ‘write’ GPX
or KML because the GPS and/or GIS does this for you, but
you can do so if you really want/need to modify old or create
new files. GPX and KML (basic) are close enough in format
and metadata for easy translation back and forth. GPX to KML
conversion is 100 percent, but KML to GPX will depend on whatis embedded besides basic GPS information, because anythingelse will be ‘lost in translation’.
KML quickly became a GIS lingua franca because it allows you
to create a KML file with say GE, then send it to someone who
may use another GIS like the Environmental Systems ResearchInstitute (ESRI) ArcGIS or vice versa (figure 5).
Note: A KMZ file is a compressed (‘zipped’) KML file or a group of
KML files.
The Geographic Markup Language (GML) is another XML
variant, developed by the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC)
for use by geographers, cartographers, et al as a modelling
language for creating and exchanging geographic data of all
types which are beyond the capabilities of KML.
Image Analysis Programs
For the purpose of this article, ‘programs’ means the awesome
and free Java-based program called ImageJ (figure 6). The ‘Eyes
in the Sky’ course covers it in great detail (along with ArcGIS), but
I can only touch on a couple of its uses because I'm still learning
what it can do.
You are probably familiar with Photoshop or GIMP, two very
popular digital darkroom and image processing programs, andwhile ImageJ has many of the same features, its real power
comes from the ability to mathematically manipulate image data
to present it in different ways (visually and/or numerically), andthis can be put to good very use for analyzing satellite and otherimages using something called a ‘lookup table’ (LUT).

Figure 5 - ArcGIS GIS View
ArcGIS handles waypoints and place markers a bit differently than Google Earth does, plus it has many more features andfunctions, including support for GML. This rotated view of Figure 1, looks down from north of “The Bluffs” trail ridge, towards
the Lake Superior basin, and all that you see would have been underwater 10000 years ago (Lake Minong).

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Courtesy NOAA

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As GEO readers know, weather satellites
don't actually measure temperatures:
they measure various wavelengths orenergy levels of the Electromagnetic (EM)spectrum ranging from infrared and visible
light, to ultraviolet. For example, APT
pristine satellite images are composed ofvarying levels (up to 256) of grays (the‘grayscale’), represented in digital (binary)
form by 0s and 1s, where one byte (8bits) is 00000000 (0) for black or ‘hot’ and11111111 (255) for white or ‘cold’, withall other levels of grays in between. The
grayscale can also be mapped to the red,green, blue (RGB) additive [primary] colour
scale between (0, 0, 0) for black or ‘hot’ and(255, 255, 255) for white or ‘cold’.
Satellite infrared (IR) and visible sensors‘see’ thermal and visible radiancesreflected/emitted from cloud tops, water,
land, vegetation, and other living things,
but the resulting images are visually dull, of
low contrast, and lacking detail, so they areusually mapped against a standard scale[thermal] LUT, ranging from minus 109°C (grayscale value 255) to plus 56.8 °C(grayscale value 0) in 0.6 °C increments. Allother LUTs are derived from this standard(see Figure 7).

Figure 6 - ImageJ

Courtesy ImageJ User Manual.

Image processing software maps various
LUTs (grayscale and colour) onto satellite
images to look for/detect: hurricanes, forest
fires, snow, ice, thunderstorms, vegetation,
precipitation, fog, etc., and ImageJ has
many predefined LUTs that you can use/
modify (or you can create new ones). Someof the things I tried to do with Photoshop/
GIMP were very time consuming, or too
difficult, but they become trivial with ImageJ(figure 8).
Another useful feature lets you to look at
terrain profiles modelled in either 2D or 3D.
For example, looking at the GIS images of
my hikes across The Bluffs (figures 1 and5), even with the tracks (in blue) overlaid
on to the terrain, it's still not easy to get
the actual ‘lay of the land’ unless you arefamiliar with the area, because dense forest
and vegetation hide the terrain's underlying
ruggedness. I created a digital elevation
model (DEM) using a Natural Resources
Canada (NRC) web mapping tool, thenprocessed it with ImageJ using the ‘Plot
Profile’ and ‘Surface Profile’ tools (figures
9a/b). Note: A DEM also uses the 256-levelgrayscale, but instead of a temperature,each gray level represents a height.
Image Measurements
I suspect that most of us have large
collections of great looking terrestrial/aerial
photographs, satellite images, plus assorted
charts and maps, etc., but unless you can
extract useful information from them, thendo something with this, of what good arethey beyond their artistic or historic values?
This is where ImageJ really shines, with

Figure 7 - IR Grayscale and LUTs

Courtesy Catalogue of Enhancements for Weather Satellites.

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Figure 8 - ImageJ and APT
I noticed something “funny” in the received NOAA-19 pristine image (left). Enlarging the area of interest (Gulf of St. Lawrence), and applying
the ImageJ “spectrum” LUT (centre), delineated the low, warmer cloud tops from the high, colder ones revealing von Karman vortices.
Insert map courtesy Natural Resources Canada.

its powerful image calibration capabilities and ability to very
accurately measure and extract useful information from pictures/images of blood drops, flora, stamps, coins, bodies of water,
vegetation, clouds, terrain, etc.
There are three image calibration methods:
1 Use any embedded reference scale metadata (ImageJ
automatically detects this).
2 Use the ImageJ line tool to measure a visual reference
scale bar (common to charts and maps).
3 Use the ImageJ line tool to measure some geographic
feature with known dimensions.
In the case of Figure 10a (obtained using Flash Earth), ImageJ
didn't detect any embedded reference scale metadata, andthere's no visual reference scale bar in the image, so I'm left with
option 3. Finding a visible, and preferably large, geophysicalfeature and zooming in on it allows you to very accurately use theline tool (figure 10b). A handy visual reference scale bar can be
added and merged into the image, completing the process (seeFigure 10c).
After calibration, ImageJ calculated the total area imaged (inFigure 10a) as approximately 291,057 square kilometres, orexactly 818.8172 km by 355.9257 km. There is a sizeable list ofmeasurement types from which you can select, depending on
what you want to determine, but for now we only need areas,
perimeters, lengths, and angles. It was very easy to measurevarious atmospheric and terrain features (cloud trail lengths,
their deflection angles, length of von Karman vortices, etc.), withall the results recorded by ImageJ in a nice tabulated list you
can save and import using other programs for any additional
processing (i.e. spreadsheet and/or database).
Some Geodata Sources(or more) of daily images taken over the same area, and thenloading the entire collection into ImageJ, creating an animated‘flip-book’. Besides being able to rapidly see daily cloud coverchanges, you can also spot any seasonal changes, or perhaps
spot some unusual surface feature using this ‘blink comparator’.
The End of the Beginning
Well, that's the end of this ‘short’ introduction to GIT. Hopefully,
you've enjoyed reading it, and perhaps I've wheted your appetite
so you'll want to delve a little deeper into this fascinating field.
References and Resources• A Passive Reflectometry and Interferometry System
M Martín-Neira (1993)• ArcGIS
http://tinyurl.com/z9fbqkq• Atmospheric Rivers and Bombs
Young Zhu and Reginald E. Newell (1994)• Atmospheric Rivers
http://tinyurl.com/zrv3d8p• Catalogue of Enhancements for Weather Satellites
Ton Lindemann (2006)• Depiction
http://www.depiction.com• Digital Atmosphere
http://tinyurl.com/86mrc2t• Digital Elevation Model
http://tinyurl.com/pjqvm64

We can collect various data/telemetry using our own equipment,
and finding additional datasets is very easy using the internet.
The National Oceanographic Atmospheric Administration (NOAA)
has huge amounts of free online ‘stuff’ to keep you busy for
years. Many countries have also been busy converting treasure
troves of old analog files to digital format, and storing them (alongwith recent digital data) on free internet archives for all to use(the Canadian GeoGratis, for example).

• Eyes in the Sky 2 GIT Course
http://tinyurl.com/ygc6p5p

The Flash Earth website is a great and simple source of dailysatellite imagery. One interesting use is collecting a month• Google Earth
http://tinyurl.com/l7wnc3c

30• Flash Earth
http://www.flashearth.com• GML
http://tinyurl.com/jk9x3vb

continued on page 33

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Figure 9a - ImageJ with Terrain Profiles 1
A custom DEM image with a line segment drawn across part of “The Bluffs” cliff trail (left), with resulting 2D profile plot of the line
segment (top), along with the grayscale 3D elevation plot of the entire area down to the Lake Superior shoreline (184 m above
MSL). The Current River flows through a deep crevasse gouged out during the last Ice Age, cutting the terrain in half (right).

Figure 9b - ImageJ with Terrain Profiles 2Same view as image 9B, but now the “spectrum” LUT is applied to the DEM image, enhancing the 3D elevation plot.

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Figure 10a - Von Karman Vortices and Deflected Cloud Streets
After noticing von Karman vortices in the NOAA-19 image, I waited for Meteor M2 to pass over the same
area for a high resolution view, but by then, most the vortices had dissipated (of course). Using Flash
Earth, I found this earlier in the week image of excellent vortices along with deflected clouds streets.

Figure 10b - Image Calibration Step 1
Anticosti Island is exactly 217 km from end to end, so I zoomed in, then used ImageJ’s line tool to bisect
it, and selected the “Set Scale” function to fill in the distance and unit of measurement (reference values),
in this case “217” and “km”.

Figure 10c - Image Calibration Step 2
An optional step, but highly recommended especially if you send images to others because having avisual reference scale bar (lower right in red) means that anyone can calibrate ImageJ just by measuring
it and entering its reference values.

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June 2016

The Group for Earth Observation• GPS (History)
http://tinyurl.com/7kqedfu• KML
http://tinyurl.com/6unjcjt• GPS (GPS Reflection ResearchGroup)
http://tinyurl.com/zfdcexl• NMEA
http://tinyurl.com/hta3mby• GPS and Water Vapour
http://gpsmet.noaa.gov• GPX
http://tinyurl.com/onk5j3g• ImageJ
https://imagej.nih.gov/ij

GEO Quarterly No 50• NOAA
http://www.noaa.gov• NRC (GeoGratis)
http://tinyurl.com/jku7g4d• VA3ROM (My Website)
http://www.va3rom.com

David Taylor provided this revealing image of Greece and Turkey, acquired from Metop‑01 on April 4, 2016.

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Nasa ASTERWEBImage: NASA/METI/AIST/Japan Space Systems, and US/Japan ASTER Science TeamIn 1991, the governments of Denmark and Sweden
agreed to build a bridge to connect the two countries
across the Oresund Strait. The 16 kilometre long
Oresund link between Malmo, Sweden (right) and
Copenhagen, Denmark (left) was completed and opened
to traffic in 2000. Denmark and Sweden were linked
once more—7,000 years after the Ice Age when they werelandlocked. The Oresund Bridge is the world’s longest
single bridge carrying both road and railway traffic.
The high bridge, with its record-breaking cable-stayed

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span of 490 metres, is designed to harmonise both
structurally and aesthetically with the approach bridges.
The connection starts on the Denmark side near the
airport, as an underwater tunnel that emerges on to a
man-made island. From there, the bridge continues to
the Sweden side.
This ASTER image acquired on April 10, 2004 by NASA’s
Terra satellite is centred near 55.6°N, 12.7°E, and covers
an area of 25 kilometres square.

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European Space Agency
Launched on April 25, 2016 from Europe’s Spaceport in
French Guiana, Sentinel-1B has produced its first images
only two hours after the radar was switched on—a record
time for a space radar. These first observations were taken
a little more than two days following launch, at 05:37 UT
on April 28, after Sentinel-1B had followed a complicatedroutine to deploy its 12-metre long radar and two 10-metre
long solar wings, as well as passing a series of initialchecks. The first image, 250 km wide, captured Svalbard,
the Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, with theAustfonna glacier clearly visible.

The European Commission leads Europe’s Copernicus
environmental programme and coordinates the broad
range of services to improve the management of theenvironment, safeguarding lives every day. ESA is
responsible for developing the family of Sentinel satellites
and ensuring the flow of data for these services.

At ESA’s operations centre in Darmstadt, Germany,
mission controllers thoroughly checked the satellite’scontrol, navigation and power systems, among others,
during the intense first few orbits. The team also
conducted the complex unfolding of the radar wings andsolar arrays.
‘It may feel a little like a routine because we launchedthree Sentinel satellites in less than 12 months, but ofcourse it is not,’ noted Volker Liebig, ESA’s Directorof Earth Observation Programmes. ‘Getting a satellite
into orbit is always thrilling and every time we do thisI am quite nervous. Our engineers and industry haveshown what we can achieve with this fourth Sentineldelivering a ﬁrst image in record time. We have anotherimportant part of the Copernicus missions in orbit. A
great achievement from a great team.’
Sentinel-1A is used by Copernicus services as well as bymany users worldwide, under a free and open data policy.
More than 30 000 users have registered to download
Sentinel data, taking some four million products
already. Sentinel-1A has already helped in coping withmany natural disasters worldwide, such as floods andearthquakes.
‘With another important milestone reached, we now
have the fourth satellite in orbit and the Sentinel
constellation as we envisaged it becomes a reality.
This will enable our Copernicus services to get betterand more data faster – and therefore help generate
more information to a broader user community on afull, open and free of charge basis. This is exactly what
we planned for with Copernicus,’ said Philippe Brunetof the European Commission, after the Sentinel-1B
launch.
When Sentinel-1B reaches its final orbit, on the
opposite side of Earth from Sentinel-1A, the radar vision
constellation will be complete, meeting the coverage andrevisit needs of Copernicus. In the coming months, the newsatellite will be tested and calibrated before it is declared
to be operational.
Each of the Sentinel-1 satellites carries an advanced
radar that images Earth’s surface through cloud andrain, whether it is day or night. It is expected that theconstellation will produce more than 10 terabytes of data
per day once it is fully operating.

Figure 1 - Sentinel 1B’s first image

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2016], processed by ESA

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Figure 2 - Edgeøya or Edge Island

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2016], processed by ESA

Sentinel 1B’s First Image

Edgeøya or Edge Island

Sentinel-1B’s first data strip (figure 1) stretches
600 kilometres, from 80°N through the Barents Sea, andshows Norway’s Svalbard archipelago on the left, wascaptured just two hours after the satellite’s radar was
switched on. Sentinel‑1B lifted off from Europe’s Spaceportin French Guiana at 21:02 UT on April 25 aboard a Soyuz
rocket. It joins its twin, Sentinel-1A, to provide more ‘radar
vision’ for Europe’s environmental Copernicus programme.

This full resolution subset of Sentinel-1B’s first data takeshows Edgeøya, one of the islands making up the Svalbard
archipelago (figure 2).

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Austfonna Ice Cap
This full resolution subset of the first Sentinel-1B image
shows Norway’s Nordaustlandet island in the Svalbard
archipelago, covered by the Austfonna ice cap (figure 3).

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Figure 3 - Nordaustlandet island

Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2016], processed by ESA

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This is a image of the British Isles on April 17, 2016 comes from NASA’s Terra satellite. This satellite offers a ground resolution of
250 metres/pixel. Despite appearances to the contrary, most of Scotland enjoyed a mainly sunny day, interrupted by short cloudy
interludes as the high herringbone cloud passed by.
Image © EUMETSAT 2016www.geo-web.org.uk

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John Tellick
These two images from Japan’s latest geostationary satellite, Himawari-8, illustrate the March 10 total eclipse over the Pacific
Ocean. When the two images are compared, a large swathe of cloud north of Australia has ‘disappeared’ during totality.

Himawari 8 image at 01.30 UT on March 10, 2016
Image: EUMETSAT 2016

Himawari 8 image at 03.00 UT on March 10, 2016
Image: EUMETSAT 2016www.geo-web.org.uk

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Image: NASA/Wikimedia Commons

Les Hamilton
Between January 28 and February 2, 2016, regular twilight
displays of amazing multicoloured clouds decorated the skies
above the British Isles and much of western Europe. Not
uncommon over polar regions of the planet, such displaysof Mother of Pearl clouds, are relatively rare at latitudes farther
than 30° from the poles. And although several minor instances
have been recorded over the years, a display such as this year’s
had not been seen since 1996. The first hint I had of anything
unusual was on the morning of January 31, from the car-parkat my local Sainsbury’s store, where, shortly before sunrise, anintensely bright purple-hued cloud glowed in the pre-dawn sky.
After completing my shopping, the cloud was still visible, andI made all haste homewards to photograph the phenomenon.
Normally, mother-of-pearl cloud has faded to insignificance by
the time that the sun rises, but in this case the display was so
intense that it was still clearly visible (figure 1). Indeed, I had toinclude the roof of my house to exclude the glare of the sun itself
from the photograph.
Polar Stratospheric Clouds

Figure 1 - Mother-of-Pearl Cloud over Aberdeen on January 31, 2016.

Mother-of-Pearl cloud, more formally known as Nacreous
Cloud, is a type of Polar Stratospheric Cloud (PSC), which forms
at altitudes between 15 to 25 kilometres in the stratosphere.
Because the stratosphere is extremely dry, it rarely supports
significant cloud. But during the extreme cold of polar winters,
when the temperature falls to -78°C and below, optically thinclouds composed of tiny ice crystals and/or supercooled water
droplets can form. Completely invisible during the hours of
daylight, they are normally at their most conspicuous during
the hour preceding dawn or following sunset, when the sun
is already several degrees below the horizon. Due to theirhigh altitude and to the curvature of the Earth, PSCs receive
sunlight from below the horizon and reflect/refract it towards
the ground, shining brightly even though the sky may be nearly
dark. A NASA photograph (figure 8) taken from a high-altitude
jet emphasises just how far above the normal cirrus cloud deckthese mother-of-pearl clouds are situated.
PSCs have an almost translucent appearance. Sunlightoriginating from below the horizon is forward-scattered within
the clouds to produce an overall pearly-white appearance,
while their tiny water droplets and ice crystals cause coloured
Interference fringes by diffraction. Because of their altitude,
PSCs rarely seem to move during the hour or so that theyremain visible, and often take the form of wave clouds
downwind of mountain ranges. It is suggested that this wavelike
appearance results from gravity waves induced in the lower
stratosphere by lee waves within the troposphere. Figure 2,
taken from Aberdeen during the 1996 PSC display, shows suchwavelike clouds just a few tens of kilometres downwind (east) of
the Cairngorms mountain range.

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Figure 2 - Wavelike PSCs observed during the January 1996 display.

Figure 3 - A bird caught in silhouette against a nacreous cloud

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Figure 4 - This brief, highly iridescent cloud wasobserved in January 1999.

GEO Quarterly No 50

Figure 5 - This cloud, observed after sunset on December 9 ,2012,suggests strong winds in the stratosphere.

Figure 6 - A Mother-of-Pearl cloud formation observed on the evening of February 2, 2016, a few kilometres west of Aberdeen..

Types of PSC
PSCs are classified into two types: Ia, b and c, and II according
to their chemical composition, which can be measured from theground using LIDAR, a the technique that can also determine
their altitude and ambient temperature.
• Type Ia PSCs contain relatively large, aspherical particles ofcrystalline compounds of water and nitric acid, in particular
nitric acid trihydrate HNO3.3H2O (often referred to as ‘NAT’).
• Type Ib PSCs contain small, spherical particles of asupercooled solution containing both sulphuric and nitricacids dissolved in water.
• Type Ic PSCs consist of small non-spherical particles ofnitric acid in water.
• Type II PSCs, which are relatively rare in the Arctic,
consist of water ice only, and are the only true motherof-pearl clouds. In the Antarctic, temperatures below-88 °C frequently result in the appearance of type II
PSCs. Temperatures as low as this are rarely attainedin the northern hemisphere, where it is believed that thegeneration of lee waves by mountains may locally cool
the lower stratosphere, thus promoting the formation ofnacreous cloud.
Type I PSCs are optically much thinner than the Type II clouds, andslightly warmer, forming at -78ºC. Rather than being composed ofwater alone, they consist mainly of hydrated droplets of nitric acidand sulphuric acid. Type I PSCs can display iridescence undercertain conditions (just like any other cloud in fact) but always less
spectacular than nacreous clouds. Occasionally, there may bepatches of nacreous cloud embedded within them.
Type II PSCs, also known as nacreous or mother-of-pearl clouds, arecomposed of crystals, and form at a slightly lower temperature(-85°C). Their temperature is below that of the lower stratosphere,
and they are composed of water-ice crystals about ten microns

across. It is the overall uniformity in size of their crystals that
produces the characteristic bright iridescent colours by diffraction
and interference.
Polar Stratospheric Clouds and the Ozone Hole
Following many decades during which CFCs (chloro fluoro
carbons) were used as aerosol propellants and refrigerants,
chlorine compounds have been escaping into the atmosphereand diffusing up to the stratosphere. The ozone layer is mainly
found in the lower portion of the stratosphere, from approximately
20 to 30 kilometres altitude, overlapping the region where PSCs
can form.
PSCs were long regarded as curiosities and of no realconsequence, but research has shown that Type I clouds inparticular are involved in harmful destruction of stratosphericozone over the Antarctic and Arctic. The surfaces of the particles
that make up Type I PSCs act as catalysts, which convert
originally benign chlorine compounds into active particles known
as free radicals (for example ClO, chlorine monoxide). Whensunlight returns to the Arctic and Antarctic during polar springtime,each of these radicals is capable of destroying many ozone
molecules through a series of chain reactions.
The presence of PSCs is doubly harmful because they also
remove gaseous nitric acid from the stratosphere, a species thatwould otherwise react with active chlorine particles, helping to
reduce their numbers and thus minimise ozone depletion.
Summary
Polar stratospheric clouds (PSCs) play a central role in theformation of the ozone hole above the Antarctic by providing
surfaces upon which chemical reactions take place to produce
active forms of chlorine, which directly destroy ozone molecules.

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Figure 7 - This particularly fine display of nacreous cloud was photographed in 2002 by Florentin Moser
Image licensed under the Wikimedia Creative Commons Attribution

Figure 8 - The colourful Mother-of-Pearl clouds seen near the top of this image were photographed from a high-flying jet aircraftby Paul Newman. The PSCs are located high above the darker cirrus clouds at the bottom of the picture.
Image courtesy of NASA (Paul Newman, GSFC).

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Professional Version of the popular APT Receiving andProcessing Package now Free to Use
Les Hamilton
In recent times, a number of APT weather satellite
enthusiasts had reported on their inability to obtain
Upgrade Keys for WXtoImg, one of the most popular
software packages for both receiving and processing
signals from the American NOAA satellites (figure 1).
In January 2016, the Upgrade option was removed from the
WXtoImg website, though no explanation was given. Then,in mid February, the Home Page was modified, presenting
the visitor, without charge, with Upgrade Keys for boththe Standard and Professional versions of the program(figure 2).
WXtoImg, developed by New Zealander Craig Anderson,
first came to notice in 2001 as a command-line driven
program which could convert WAV files produced by otherprograms into images. But within a year, WXtoImg had
developed into an all-in-one software solution for weather
satellite reception and processing, with functionality to
add country outline overlays, and allow user control overthe colours of boundaries, rivers, cities etc.
But it seems that Craig Anderson has now ceased
developing this highly popular software—version 2.10.11
dates back to 2010, and the 2.11.2 beta version to April
2013—and decided to offer the program free to use.
One important point: the ‘Full Names’ listed below must
be entered precisely as shown, with the same mix of lower
and upper case letters.

Figure 1
A typical WXtoImg screen, showing a colour composite image for the
14.10 UT NOAA 19 pass on April 16, 2016.

Figure 2

The universal Upgrade Codes, which became available at http://www.wxtoimg.com/ during February 2016.
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NASA Earth Observatory
Last Issue, GEO Quarterly carried a reportthat the Nansen Ice Shelf was splittingfrom Antarctica. In the months since, theprocess has accelerated, and two large
icebergs have calved along the line of thepreviously reported crack.
The progression of the crack was visible
in a pair of satellite images acquired in
December 2013 and 2015 [1]. Ryan Walker
and Christine Dow, glaciologists at NASA’s
Goddard Space Flight Center, flew along
the crack in late 2015. It was clearly still
attached. On April 6, 2016, with southern
winter soon to set in, satellite imagery
indicated that the cracking ice front was
still holding on.
But 24 hours later, during the final
few days before winter darkness set
in, the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on the Terrasatellite acquired this image as the ‘bergs
broke away.

The newly calved icebergs off the Nansen Ice Shelf

The Nansen Ice Shelf previously
measured about 35 × 50 kilometres. For
comparison, the Drygalski Ice Tongue justsouth of Nansen stretches 80 kilometresinto the sea. Of the two ‘bergs shed from
Nansen, only the larger one meets thesize criteron for naming and tracking by
the US National Ice Center: it has been
named C33.
But why did the crack finally give out?
According to Walker, summer melting
probably helped to weaken and breakup the shelf fragments and sea ice (themélange) within the crack, which acted
like glue to keep the ‘bergs attached.
Summer melt also could have helped
the deeply fissured ice to break further,completing the crack across the shelf.
Once broken off, the new icebergs would
have been pushed away from the shelfby the strong katabatic winds that blowout to sea. Walker emphasized that thisis routine iceberg calving—there areindications that similar events occurred
there in the 1960s—and not a collapse of
the ice shelf itself. Nonetheless, scientists
are concerned for a different reason:
the icebergs are threatening scientificequipment in the area. Scientists at New
Zealand’s National Institute of Water
and Atmospheric Research (NIWA) saythat the ‘bergs are deep enough thatthey cold-snag a mooring deployed in
Terra Nova Bay. The mooring collects

44

An enlarged view of the calved icebergs

data on the effects of climate change
on sea ice and ice shelves. According
to oceanographer Mike Williams: ‘We
won’t know until we go back next summer
whether it is still there. We could lose awhole year of data. If that happens it will
leave a gap in our research and that’s
unfortunate. However, it is a risk we haveto take. We could see the crack fromsatellite images but predicting when an
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ice shelf will calve is difficult. It could have
happened any time in the next five years’.
NASA Earth Observatory image by Jesse Allen,
using data from the Land Atmosphere Near real-time
Capability for EOS (LANCE).
Caption by Kathryn Hansen.

Reference
1 Nansen Ice Shelf Splitting from Antartcica
GEO Quarterly No 49 (2016), page 49.

Following the demise of Meteor M1 on March 20, 2016, Meteor M2’s LRPT was reactivated the following
day, making overnight infrared images available once more. This channel‑5 image, acquired at 20.43 UT on
March 31 by Les Hamilton, shows the British Isles shivering under a brief ridge of high pressure.

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Jeff Kelly captured this striking image from Meteor M2 on March 31, 2016,
showing ‘Nice representation of the winds affecting the North East USA’.

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Enrico Gobbetti submitted these two fine images from Meteor‑M2, both acquired on March 31, 2016.
The upper image was acquired at 09:15 UT and the lower one an orbit earlier at 07:36 UT.

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NASA Earth Observatory
At 1.7 million square kilometres, theGreenland ice sheet is three times thesize of Texas. On average, the ice isabout 1600 meters deep and contains
enough water to raise global sea levels
about 6 meters were it all to melt.
Global sea level rise is one of the
major environmental challenges of the
21st Century and Greenland is central
to the problem. Its massive ice sheet
touches the sea along more than
44,000 kilometres of jagged coastline.
Hundreds of fjords, inlets and bays
bring ocean water right to the edgeof the ice and, in some places, under
it. This means that the ice sheet
is not just melting from warm airtemperatures above: it is also most
likely being melted from water below.
For this reason, a team of scientists
led by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s
Josh Willis have launched the Oceans
Melting Greenland, or OMG, field
campaign. Started in the summer of2015, OMG is a five-year airborneand ship-based mission to study the

Figure 1 - Sonar map of part of the Greenland Coastline

NASA Earth Observatory map by Joshua Stevens, using Oceans
Melting Greenland (OMG) data courtesy of Josh Willis/JPL.

Figure 2 - NASA Photo: Josh Willis

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role of the oceans in melting Greenland’sice. Researchers will examine thetemperatures and other properties ofNorth Atlantic waters along the coast,
while also making measurements of theglaciers that reach the ocean. The OMG
team is also building a profile of the sea
floor around the island in order to bettermodel how warm, deep ocean watermight flow into those fjords and reachthe glacier edges.
The map (figure 1) shows some early
results from OMG. In the late summer of2015, the OMG team outfitted a fishingboat with sonar equipment to map the
shape of the sea floor (the bathymetry)along the west coast of Greenland.
The depth of the water is shown inshades of blue, with the deepest shades
representing the deepest parts. Note thedeep trench offshore from the Cornell
and Ussing Braeer glaciers. Many ofthese canyons were cut into the sea floor
during the advance and retreat of ice
during the most recent Ice Age.
In this part of the North Atlantic, thewarmest water is actually in the deepest
parts of the sea, below waters that arecooled by cold Arctic air temperatures
and winds. The OMG mapping effort will
help the team to determine where deep
Atlantic warm water might be able toreach the ice through the complicatedcurrents and circulation around thesecanyons.
In March and April 2016, the OMG teambegan another phase of their campaign.
Flying out of Iceland and Greenland,
the team has been using a NASA G-III
aircraft to survey coastal glaciers. The
plane is equipped with the Glacier and
Ice Surface Topography Interferometer(GLISTIN-A), a type of radar that cangenerate high-resolution, high-precision
measurements of the height of coastal
glaciers. The team will make such survey
flights each spring through 2020 to trackchanges in glacier extent, as evidence ofgrowth or thinning in each melt season.
In the summer or fall of 2016, the thirdpart of the research campaign will begin.
The team will fly along both coasts
and release 250 expendable sensors
that can measure the temperatureand salinity of coastal waters from thesurface to a depth of 1000 metres. These
measurements of temperature properties
will help to complete the puzzle of how
the ocean and ice are interacting, leading
researchers to build better models of ice
sheet changes and sea level rise.
Caption compiled by Mike Carlowicz from reportingby Patrick Lynch and Carol Rasmussen, NASA Earth
Science Communications.

Greenland’s coastline imaged on July 16, 2015 by NASA’s Aqua satellite

NASA image courtesy Jeff Schmaltz, LANCE/EOSDIS MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA GSFC

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ESA

Image © ESA / Contains modified Copernicus Sentinel data [2016], processed by ESA

The new Sentinel-3A satellite recently began providing datafrom orbit, and this very early image recorded on March 3,
2016 takes us over the River Nile, its Delta and the surrounding
desert areas of northeast Africa and parts of the Middle East.
Very distinct is Egypt, a country connecting northeast Africa with
the Middle East, home to millennia-old monuments still sitting
along the lush Nile valley. In the centre of the image, its capital
city Cairo is visible with the Nile snaking northwards, alongwith the Red Sea just further east. Also evident are the islandsof Cyprus further north in the Mediterranean Sea and parts ofCrete on the very left.
One of the suite of sophisticated instruments that will measure
Earth’s oceans, land, ice and atmosphere, Sentinel-3’s Sea
and Land Surface Temperature Radiometer (SLSTR) samples theenergy radiating from Earth’s surface in nine spectral bands,
including visible and infrared. This instrument improves on

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the capabilities of the Advanced Along-Track Scanning Radiometer
carried by the Envisat satellite of 2002–12, including a wider
swath of 1400 kilometres, new channels and a somewhat
higher spatial resolution. Combining radiometer and colour data
helps us to understand the state of vegetation better.
Launched earlier this year on February 16, Sentinel-3
will systematically measure Earth’s oceans, land, ice andatmosphere to monitor and understand large-scale global
dynamics. It will provide essential information in near-realtime for ocean and weather forecasting, among other major
applications.
Over land, this innovative mission will provide a bigger
picture by monitoring wildfires, mapping the way land is used,providing iindices of vegetation state and measuring the heightof rivers and lakes, thus complementing the high-resolution
measurements of its sister mission, Sentinel-2.

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Robert C. Mazur (va3rom@gmail.com)
Although this is somewhat off-topic, I
thought GEO readers might be interested
in my efforts to photograph the May 9,2016 transit of the planet Mercury acrossthe face of the sun.
Figure 1 is one of my best pictures ofthe event, taken at 0811 EDT (1411 UT).
While not as spectacular as a transit ofVenus, given Mercury’s much smaller size,
I was pleasantly surprised at the results.
Focusing was tough, even with my DSLR’s‘live view’, and I should have pre-focusedon something the night before. Then I useda shutter speed of only 1/100 s and DINof 100; I should really have used 1/1600s and DIN 1600 because the effective
focal length (EFL) of my 125 mm diameter
Makutsov (mirror) scope is 1250 mm.
The result was some motion blur, andMercury isn’t quite round as a result. I
overlaid the image on to a transit reportsheet where you would normally draw yourobservation of the event, and tried to match
their different scales as closely as possible(figure 2).
The DSLR was directly coupled to thescope as you would with any other lens,but focusing had to be manual and, inbright daylight, it was very hard to get it
right. What made it more interesting was
the small sunspot group (to the northeastof Mercury) which I measured using
ImageJ to be over 12,500 km across (ascompared to the sun’s diameter of 1.392
million km), which is almost over 2½ times
the diameter of Mercury.

Figure 1 - The Transit of Mercury

The original image cut off the bottom of
the sun, so I cheated by used Photoshop
to copy, flip and paste part of the top solar
limb at the bottom of the image. Also, there
are a few classic ‘donut hole’ shaped dust
rings caused by the Mak mirror focusing,and them being visible in bright sunlight.
Otherwise, without the sunspot group,
it was a pretty boring event and I only
watched Mercury move across for the
first couple of hours, on and off, while I
played ham radio with the International
Space Station (ISS) and a couple of othertelemetry transmitting amateur radio
Cubesats using my handheld VHF/UHF
radio and beam antenna.
So, I’ve managed to see solar transits ofboth Venus and Mercury. Seeing Mercury
is a rare event for me, because I’ve only
seen the planet at night a couple of times
and have never photographed it before
since it’s a tough target.

Figure 2 - The Transit of Mercury overlain on a Transit Report Sheetwww.geo-web.org.uk

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NASA Earth Observatory
On January 20, 2016, scientists fromNASA and the National Oceanicand Atmospheric Administration(NOAA) released their analyses of
surface temperatures for the past
year. The NASA team found that
globally averaged temperatures fromJanuary through December 2015
were 0.87 degrees Celsius above thenorm (defined as a 1951–1980 baseperiod). The previous record—set lastyear—was 0.74°C above the norm.
For the planet, 2015 was more thana full degree Celsius warmer thantemperatures in 1880, when consistentrecord-keeping began.
Working independently, NOAA
researchers found 2015 to be 0.90°C
above the 1901–2000 average.
According to their analysis, 2015 was
the second warmest year on record forthe continental United States, Africa,
and Europe. It was the warmest year
for Asia and South America. Globally,
new monthly temperature records were
set in every month except January and
April.
The map depicts global temperature
anomalies in 2015. It does not show
absolute temperatures, but instead
shows how much warmer or cooler
different regions of the Earth werecompared with a baseline average
from 1951 to 1980.
The team from NASA’s Goddard
Institute for Space Studies (GISS)
assembles its temperature analysis
from publicly available data acquiredby roughly 6,300 meteorologicalstations around the world; by ship- andbuoy-based instruments measuring
sea surface temperature; and by
Antarctic research stations. Thisraw data is analysed using methods
that account for the varied spacingof temperature stations around theglobe and for urban heating effects
that could skew the calculations. For
more explanation of how the analysis
works, read ‘World of Change: Global
Temperatures’ [1].
The 2015 temperature record
continues a long-term warming
trend that has largely been driven byincreased carbon dioxide and othergreenhouse gases that humans haveemitted into the atmosphere. Most of
the warming has occurred in the past

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35 years, with 15 of the 16 warmest years
on record occurring since 2001.

appears likely to be another very warm
year.

Phenomena such as El Niño or La Niña,
which warm or cool the tropical Pacific
Ocean, can contribute to short-term
variations in global average temperature.
The graph shows temperature trends inrelation to El Niño and La Niña events.

‘2015 was remarkable even in thecontext of the ongoing El Niño’,stated NASA GISS Director Gavin
Schmidt. ‘Last year’s temperatures
had an assist from El Niño, but it is
the cumulative effect of the long-term
trend that has resulted in the record
warming that we are seeing.’

Orange bars represent global temperature
anomalies in El Niño years, with theorange line showing the trend. Purple bars
depict La Niña years, and the purple line
shows that trend. Neutral years are shownin gray, and the dashed black line shows
the overall temperature trend since 1950.
Note that, while El Niño conditions
dominated the Pacific Ocean for mostof 2015, it was not officially an El
Niño year in strict climatological terms
because ocean conditions did not
manifest themselves until April 2015. In
the past, the highest global temperaturerecords were often set in El Niño years,
which suggests that 2016—with El Niño
becoming strong as of mid-January—
www.geo-web.org.uk‘Climate change is the challengeof our generation’, said NASA
Administrator Charles Bolden.
‘Today’s announcement not only
underscores how critical NASA’s Earthobservation program is; it is a key data
point that should make policymakers
stand up and take notice. Now is thetime to act on climate.’
Reference
1 http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/
WorldOfChange/decadaltemp.php
NASA images by Joshua Stevens, based on datafrom the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.
Caption by Mike Carlowicz.

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EUMETCast On-Line
Registration Guide
If you require to register as a first-timeuser for any of the free EUMETCast
data streams such as MSG, NOAAAVHRR, Metop etc., or need to renew
an existing subscription, this must be
done on-line.
GEO has produced a step-by-stepguide to the entire process at
http://www.geo-web.org.uk/eumreg.
phpThis guide also contains a direct linkto the official EUMETCast on-line
registration form, which can otherwise
prove somewhat tricky to locate.

Weather Satellite Reports
If there is a single Internet Forumthat is relevant to all weather satellite
enthusiasts, it must surely be Douglas
Deans’ Weather Satellite reports.
Here you will find every conceivabletype of information about weather
satellites, whether polar or
geostationary, APT, HRPT, LRIT,
EUMETCast or whatever.
Absolutely everything is covered, andthe information is updated every week.
Special additional bulletins may be
issued if an important change takes
place mid week.
You can read the bulletins from thisURL
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/weather-satellite-reports/info
or, even better, elect to have thereports sent to you by email every
Monday.

Internet Discussion Groups
There are a numerous Internet-based
discussion groups of interest to weather
satellite enthusiasts. The home pagefor each group provides an email
address through which you can request
membership. Even a blank email
containing the word ‘subscribe’ in its
Subject line is all that is required.
APT Decoder
This is a group where users ofPatrik Tast’s APTDecoder can share
information and problems.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/APTDecoder/info
GEO-Subscribers

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This is GEO’s own group, where
members can exchange information

The Group for Earth Observationand post queries relating to any aspect
related to weather satellite reception(hardware, software, antennas etc),
Earth observation satellites and any
GEO-related matter.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/GEO-Subscribers/info
Satsignal
An end-user self‑help group for users ofDavid Taylor’s Satellite Software Tools(SatSignal, WXtrack, GeoSatSignal,
HRPT Reader, GroundMap, MSG DataManager, AVHRR Manager and the
ATOVS Reader).
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/SatSignal/info
MSG-1
A forum dedicated to Meteosat
Second Generation (MSG), where
members share information about the
EUMETCast reception hardware andsoftware.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/MSG-1/info
WXtoImg-l
A forum for users of the WXtoImg
software application for receiving andprocessing imagery from the NOAA
satellite APT signals.
https://groups.yahoo.com/neo/groups/wxtoimg-l/info

GEO Helplines
Douglas Deans, Dunblane, Scotland.
All aspects of weather satellites from
APT, HRPT to Meteosat-9 DVB/EUMETCast systems.
• telephone:(01786) 82 28 28• e-mail: dsdeans@btinternet.com
John Tellick, Surrey, England.

June 2016
Mike Stevens, Dorset, England.
Assistance with reception of
EUMETCast to include Metop-A andMetop-B; also MSG Data reception
and set-up within the PC, assistancewith dish alignment and set-up, andinstallation and set-up of TBS DVB-S2
units.
• email: mikeg4cfz@gmail.com
Guy Martin, Kent, England.
Guy is prepared to advise anyone who
wishing to receive MSG/Metop using
Windows 2000 or XP. Can also help
with networking and ADSL router setup.
•

gmartin@electroweb.co.uk

Hector Cintron, Puerto Rico, USA.
Hector is prepared to field enquiries on
HRPT, APT, EMWIN and NOAAPORT••

Phone: 787-774-8657
e-mail: n1tkk@hwic.net

Email contact can of course be madeat any time, but we would ask you torespect privacy by restricting telephone
contact to the period 7.00 - 9.00 pm in
the evenings.

Copy for GEO Quarterly
Original contributions relating to
any aspect of Earth Imaging should
be submitted in electronic format(although handwritten and typed copy
will be accepted).
Please note that major articles whichcontain a large number of illustrations
should be submitted as early as
possible before copy deadline,
to give time for preparation prior to
publication.

Meteosat advice: registering for thevarious MSG services, hardware
and software installation andtroubleshooting. John will also
field general queries about any
aspect of receiving weather satellite
transmissions.

Please note that it is preferred thatsatellite images are provided without
added grid lines, country outlines or
captions unless these are consideredessential for illustrative purposes in an
accompanying article.

• telephone: (0208) 390 3315
• e-mail: info@geo-web.org.uk

Materials for publication should be sent
to the editor,
Les Hamilton
8 Deeside Place
Aberdeen AB15 7PW
ScotlandThe most efficient way to do this is byemail attachments to the following
address

Geoff Morris, Flintshire, NE Wales.
Geoff has lots of experience with aerial,
coax connectors, mounting hardware
etc. and has also done a lot of work withthe orbiting satellites. Geoff has beena EUMETCast Meteosat user for sometime and is familiar with David Taylor’s
MSG software. He should be able toshare his experiences with newcomers
to this branch of the hobby.
• Tel: (01244) 818252• e-mail: gw3atz@btopenworld.com
www.geo-web.org.uk

Submission of Copy

geoeditor@geo-web.org.uk
Particularly large attachments (8 MB
and above) can be transmitted via
Hightail
https://wwwhightail.com/

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