Group for Earth Observation

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

33

March 2012
Inside this issue . . .
Ed Murashie reports on
his tour of Vandenburg Air
Force Base, shortly before
the launch of the NPP
satellite.
Tutiuone is a new free
software program thatallows you to measure
EUMETCast and Envi-Ham
signal and quality with
unprecedented accuracy.
Esko Petäjä has beentrialling it and details its
features.
Ukraine’s new Sich-2
satellite is now producing
some amazing highdefinition imagery of the
Earth. Les Hamilton
provides an overview ofthis versatile yet
lightweight spacecraft.
In an article aimed at APT
enthusiasts, Don Wilson
relates his experiencesusing antenna diversity
with the Wraase APT-06
receiver.
In ‘Sahara Revealed’, an
Envisat image submitted
by Peter Burden has led toa full-scale article on thisenigmatic region.

... and much more.

GEO MANAGEMENT TEAM
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: info@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
Fax:
01509 559 015
Technical Consultant (Hardware)David Simmons
email: tech@geo-web.org.uk
Webmaster and Website Matters
David Anderson,
e-mail: webmaster@geo-web.org.uk
Education Coordinator
David Painteremail: education@geo-web.org.uk
GEO Shop Manager
Clive Finnis (Assistant: David Simmons),
email: tech@geo-web.org.uk
International Liaison
Rob Denton,
email: international@geo-web.org.uk
Nigel Evansemail: nigel@geo-web.org.uk

Publisher
Published by The Group for Earth
Observation Limited, a company inEngland and Wales, limited by guarantee
and not having share capital.
The Company Number is 4975597.
The registered office is Coturnix House,
Rake Lane, Milford, Godalming,
Surrey GU8 5AB, England.
Printing
Hedgerow Print,
16 Marsh Lane,
Crediton,
Devon EX17 1ES.
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 publisheddesign or any constructions carried out bymembers or other third parties.
Copyright GEO © 2012
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.

Les Hamilton
geoeditor@geo-web.org.uk

Thanks to a query from Peter Burden, who sent us an Envisat image he had obtained throughthe Envi-Ham project, we have an article, ‘Sahara Revealed’, starting on page 32. When I
first saw Peter’s image, I was quite taken aback. It was extraordinary—quite unlike any satellite
image I had seen before. Peter was also uncertain as to what it displayed and expressed thehope that we could cast some light on the features shown. My research led to this article, which
met with Peter’s approval. I hope you enjoy reading it too.

W

hen GEO was first established it was hoped that the content of the GEO Quarterly
magazines would be largely reader driven, an aspiration that has rarely been realised.
But Peter’s approach—sending in a query with an image—just shows how easily a significant
article can be realised. So do, please, consider making contributions to your Quarterly: this canbe in the form of letters to the editor, articles about satellites, the weather, Earth imaging, and ofcourse requests for information on a topic that intrigues you. You can make the difference, even
if it is just by triggering the imagination as Peter has done.

We don’t as a rule receive many contributions for our Feedback column: none at all thisissue. It would be nice to receive informed comment about GEO Quarterly articles, be it
additional background information, corrections or criticism. I hope that every reader would feel
free to email the editor with comments. It’s all about promoting and discussing our interest in
the world around us and sharing that elusive item of knowledge that can enhance everyone’s
enjoyment.

T

his issue sees a minor ‘Spring Clean’ for the Quarterly. The GEO Shop listing finds a newhome on the back page with the Helplines and Membership Form now also located at
the end of the magazine. This will permit articles to flow more freely through the pages of theQuarterly.

T

his first issue of 2012 contains an eclectic mix of material from the descriptive to thetechnical. There are several interesting items of general reading from the NASA Earth
Observatory; Ed Murashie’s visit to the Vandenburg Air Force base just prior to the launchof NASA’s NPP satellite; an overview of EUMETSAT’s new ePort Internet utility; Tutioune, afantastic new software development for monitoring EUMETCast and Envi-Ham signals; and lots
more besides. I hope you enjoy this issue and look forward to hearing your views on it.

Contents
GEO Report
Cover and Full Page Images
Sea Ice off Southwestern Alaska
Katabatic Winds Rake Terra Nova Bay
My Meteosat System: 1975-2012
The Vandenburg Tours
Indonesian Odyssey
Receiving two Satellites on One Dish
Tutioune: Software to Analyse your Envisat System
Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Thane
Using and Organising Weather Satellie Data
Desulfator
The Aurora
2011’s Final Tropical Storms
Minus 30 and Falling
Sich 2 - Ukraine’s Latest Remote Sensing Satellite
Subscribe to these Free PublicationsЗапорізька АЕС
NPP - the First Months in Orbit
Aniakchak National Monument
Sahara Revealed
Using Antenna Diversity with APT
Currently Active Weather Satellites and Frequencies
Expand your Horizons with the EUMeTrain ePort
Lee Wave Clouds Stream across the UK
Helplines and Internet Discussion Groups
Copy deadline for the next issue of GEO Quarterly
GEO Membership Application FormGEO Shop Catalogue and Price List

Francis Bell
NASA Earth Observatory
NASA Earth Observatory
Guy Martin
Ed Murashie
Francis Bell
Mike Stevens
Esko Petäjä
David Taylor
Robert Moore
Rob Denton
NASA Earth Observatory
John Tellick
Les Hamilton
Les Hamilton
Francis BellLes Hamilton
Les Hamilton
NASA Earth Observatory
Les Hamilton
Don Weston
Robert Moore
Peter Burden

2
3
4
5
6
8
12
13
15
19
20
21
22
24
25
26
30
32
34
36
37
41
42
43
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46
46
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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Francis BellI recently asked David
Anderson, our Membership
Secretary, for details of ourcurrent members. He provided
me with this detailed table. I
am concerned with the issues
which the table seems to reveal.
Our total membership number
is in decline, which poses thequestion: ‘Why should this behappening’. Should our group’s
aims and objectives be reviewed
to encompass wider interests
or should we be more diligent
regarding the maintenance of
our existing membership?

GEO Membership
August August
2011
2010
Australia
Austria
Belgium
CanadaDenmark
FinlandFranceGermany
Hong Kong
Ireland
Italy
Japan
Mauritius
Netherlands
New Zealand
NorwayPortugal
Spain
Spain
SwedenTurkeyUSA
Vietnam

6
5
8
2
0
2
9
9
1
8
11
1
1
29
6
4
0
8
8
5
1
13
1
TotalsEurope99
Rest of World
35
UK
268
Overall
402

7
4
11
4
1
2
10
5
1
6
11
1
1
28
7
2
1
6
6
5
1
21
1

With the current membershipsubscription at its present level,
membership income only justcovers GEO’s running costs.
Also, it is important to havea wide membership becauseof the resources of talent andexperience which members
can share with each other. If
you have any suggestions for
attracting a wider membership,
please let me know. In the93
meantime, I will try to progress45
the renewal of recent lapsed
285
members: this will include those423
in the USA. On a personallevel, I will try to promote
GEO Membership Figures
GEO by writing articles relating
to our interests in weather satellites and submit this material toappropriate publications. And finally, please don’t forget to renew
your own membership when it falls due.
Help with the GEO Shop
I have written before about the importance of the GEO Shop. Not
only does it make a profit for us, providing a financial buffer should
it ever be needed, but importantly it provides access to items ofhardware for satellite reception that an individual member could findextremely difficult to source independently.
The issue at the moment relates to additional help which is needed
to run GEO Shop. Clive and Carol Finnis, who established theshop in 2004, have given notice of their intention to relinquish their
shop responsibilities in the latter part of this year. Our most sincere
thanks go to Clive and Carol for all they have done for us in thepast, and not forgetting David Simmons, who has acted as assistant
shop manager in recent years. I am pleased to report that David willcontinue to fulfil his role as assistant shop manager but this leaves
us looking for someone new to take over from Clive and Carol.
The main responsibility for the new Shop Manager will be holding
and dispatching items of stock, together with appropriate packaging
materials. Access to a convenient Post Office would be anadvantage. The stock is not very bulky and is contained in a few
cardboard boxes. Clive and Carol may be in a position to continue
to look after the placement of orders and finances: these details canbe established once the new Shop Manager has been appointed.

2

Can you help out here? GEO needs a response to this request fora member to take on this responsibility because, without a shop,
we are all disadvantaged. For finer details of responsibilities pleasecontact myself at francis@geo-web.org.uk
or Clive at tech@geo-web.org.uk.
Future Events
March 17
March 31

Werkgroep Kunstmanen will be holding one of theirregular meetings In Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Tornado and Storm Research Organisation (TOORO)
is holding one of their six-monthly meetings in
Oxford. Last year GEO was represented and gave apresentation at one of the TORRO meetings. Thereis considerable interest overlap between GEO andTORRO hence attendance at a meeting is very
worthwhile. For details of this meeting visit
www.torro.org.uk

April 22
May 12

The West London Radio and Electronics Show will beheld at Kempton Park. GEO have a stand booked forthis show.
Werkgroep Kunstmanen will be holding one or theirregular meeting in Utrecht, The Netherlands. A numberof UK based GEO members have said they will attend
this meeting and all UK members are encouraged tobe supportive of our Dutch friends on this occasion.
For further details for the meeting visit
www.kunstmanen.net

June 8June 17

GEO’s visit to SSTL at Guildford. Please see theseparate notice relating to this proposed visit.
Newbury Radio Rally and Boot Sale. GEO will beattending this popular rally with a stand running live
EUMETCast reception. The venue is Newbury Show
Ground. For details of this event visit
www.nadars.org.uk

Sep 14/16 AMSAT-UK will be holding their annual colloquium
at the Holiday Inn, Guildford. Note that the date forthis meeting is six weeks later than in previous years
because of accommodation arrangements dictated by
the Olympic Games. In the past GEO has contributed
to the AMSAT_UK meetings. For details of this meeting
visit
www.uk.amsat.org

Sep 28/29 The National Hamfest exhibition and show is to be held
for the fourth time at the Newark Show Ground. The
show is sponsored by the RSGB and the Lincoln Short
Wave Club. GEO will again have a stand running live
satellite reception. This is a large two-day show, witheasy access and is well worth a visit. For more details
visit
www.nationalhamfest.org.uk

Volcanoes: A Quarterly Challenge
Instead of the usual Quarterly Question, I thought it might beinteresting, as a variation, to pose a Quarterly Challenge this time.
The idea was prompted by my recent visit to Indonesia with its
selection of volcanoes forming a section of the ‘Pacific Ring ofFire’. During my visit I saw many volcanoes, some of which are still
active. See photograph on page 12.

www.geo-web.org.uk

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

I thought it would be interesting to challenge members to receive images of volcanoes
and then submit their best image(s) for publication. There are active and extinct
volcanoes on all the continents so there is scope for members living in any part of theworld to receive images showing volcanoes. For this challenge, any satellite imageof any extinct or active volcano is acceptable, provided it has been received directlyfrom satellite. I can think of a number of satellites which offer live reception, potentiallygenerating volcano images within the scope of this challenge.
The challenge will be left open till the end of the year. If you have something ofinterest, please submit it without delay as entries published can be spread over anumber of Quarterlies. Please send entries to myself at
francis@geo-web.org.uk

Since drafting the above text I have received a very interesting image displaying a
volcano. I will submit this image myself for potential publication in our next Quarterly:
it will act as an example image, plus the reminder to members that the challenge isrunning for the rest is this year.

GEO Quarterly No 33

Cover and Full Page Images
Front CoverThis is a section from an image acquiredby the new NASA NPP satellite’s Visible
Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS), on
January 19 this year. The high-resolution image
shows striking detail of the state of Florida.
Image: NASA/NPP

Inside Front CoverMemories of last year’s wonderful May weather
come from Mike Stevens, who sent us thislovely NOAA-19 AVHRR image from the
12:24 UT NOAA 19 pass on May 1, 2011.
Image © EUMETSAT 2011

GEO Visit to Surrey Satellite Technology Limited (SSTL)

Inside Back CoverSurrey University’s involvement with satellites goes back to the early 1980s with
UoSAT-1 and UoSAT-2. Subsequent research and commercial development led to thedesign and production of many specialist ‘small’ satellites by SSTL. In the past someprivileged members of GEO will have enjoyed a tour of SSTL’s facilities on Surrey
University’s campus. However, as a result of the growth of SSTL, they have moved
to larger purpose-built facilities on the nearby Research Park. GEO’s recent contact
with SSTL has resulted in an invitation for GEO members to have a guided tour of the
new SSTL facilities. The arranged date for this tour is Friday June 8. On the same day,other activities are being arranged for our members and it is hoped to have a meetingroom with facilities for displays and demonstrations. The finalised details for this day
will be published on our website. This visit to SSTL is a unique opportunity for us tovisit the very latest satellite production facility in the country. If you wish to register forthis visit, email your details to Rob Denton at

This is a ‘first’ for GEO Quarterly, a threechannel colour composite image from Russia’s
Meteor 3 No1 satellite. Acquired on October 22,
2009, the image includes part of the Black Sea,
Turkey and the islands Crete and Cyprus.

international@geo-web.org.uk

Back CoverFrancis Breame provided this Envisat MERIS
image which shows a section of the of east
Greenland coastline. It dates from September
11, 2011, just at the end of the melting season.
Great swirls of brash ice can be seen drifting
down the coast.
Image: ESA

and follow details to be published on our website nearer the time.

Page 23

Quarterly Question 32
My thanks go to the following members who submitted answers to Quarterly
Question 32. This question related to naming a river in southwest Madagascar, which
was conspicuous on a satellite image because of the visible sediments distributed
across the river’s flood plain. The name of the river in question is ‘Onilahy’, and it
discharges its waters into the Mozambique Channel in southwest Madagascar at the
town of Saint Augustin. Answers were received fromElmar Bogels, Brunssum, Netherlands
Bill Baily, G4GUC, UK
Ken Morgan, VK3CEK, Australia
Anders Hook, SwedenPeter Burden UK
Andreas Lubnow, Germany
I think that, if I had been faced with this question, I would have researched an answer
using Wikipedia. I’m sure some members submitting an answer did this. However,... continued on page 25

If your copy of GEO Quarterly fails to arrive by mail within four weeksof the advertised publication time, please address your queries toMembership Secretary, who can arrange for a replacement copy.

Winter finally arrived in Scotland when an areaof high pressure hovered over the country
for several days during early November lastyear. This MODIS image from NASA’s Aqua
satellite shows Scotland all but cloud-free at
13:05 UT on November 7. Mist is beginning to
obscure the Northwest Highlands and the Outer
Isles, but the most striking features are theglens filled with valley fog. Across the Central
Highlands snake the broad valleys containing
Loch Tummel and Loch Tay, merging in theeast into the broad strath carrying the River
Tay. To the west, the fog continues along Glen
Ogle and Glen Falloch to join the roughly
triangular mass of fog obscuring Loch Lomond.
Image: NOAA

Page 29
Ukraine’s new Sich‑2 Earth Resources
Satellite acquired this spectacular image of
San Francisco Bay on September 18 this year.
Sich‑2 can image at a resolution of just eight
metres, thirty times better than the MODIS
spectroradiometers flown on NASA spacecraft.
In this view, both San Francisco and Oakland
international airports are clearly visible, as is
the former island prison, Alcatraz.
Image: Dniprokosmos

Page 31

Contact Details
David Anderson, 35 Sycamore Road, East Leake,
Loughborough LE12 6PP
England, UK.
Telephone:
Fax:

Image: SRC Planeta - http://planet.iitp.ru/english/index_eng.htm

This Metop‑A image of New Zealand, acquired
via EUMETCast on December 21, 2011,
was sent in by Mike Stevens. Not only areboth main islands in clear view, but there areinteresting cloud formations to the east of North
Island.

01509 820 067
01509 559 015

Image © EUMETSAT 2011

email: members@geo-web.org.uk

www.geo-web.org.uk

3

GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

A NASA Earth Observatory Report

Snow rested on the land surface while ice rested on the seassurrounding southwestern Alaska in early 2012. The Moderate
Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) aboard NASA’s
Aqua satellite captured this image on January 15. Pristine snow
blankets the mountains and plains, and tendrils of sea ice fill Bristol
Bay.

North of the area in this image, a heavy November storm followedby continuing harsh weather conditions had prevented the deliveryof much-needed winter fuel to the city of Nome. Thick sea ice
continued to hamper efforts to reach the area throughout early
January until a Russian tanker finally succeeded on January 16,
2012.

Arctic sea ice waxes and wanes throughout the year, andconditions around Alaska, and in the Bering Sea, fluctuate eachseason and from year to year. The sea ice extent last January,
though not a record, was nevertheless the highest it had been forseveral years, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Overall, Arctic sea ice typically grows throughout the month ofJanuary, reaching its peak in late February or March.

4

www.geo-web.org.uk

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

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

A NASA Earth Observatory Report

Shortly before the onset of spring inthe southern hemisphere, Antarctica’s
Inexpressible Island (upper left) and theNorthern Foothills Mountains (top right)
were illuminated by a glimmer of low-angle
sunlight when the Advanced Land Imager(ALI) on NASA’s Earth Observing-1 (EO-1)
satellite captured this image on September
16, 2009. The seaward slopes of themountains are gleaming white and cast longshadows inland over the Nansen Ice Sheet.
The scene provides two indications of
the bay’s persistent and fierce katabatic

winds—downslope winds that blow fromthe interior of the ice sheet toward thecoast. One is the windswept ground in themountainous terrain where, in many places,
the pattern of bare rock and snow drifts
suggests that the winds have scoured snow
from upwind slopes and deposited it on thelee sides. The second sign is the parallel
white streamers of newly formed sea ice on
the open waters of Terra Nova Bay (lower
right), which are continually being pushed
out to sea by the strong offshore winds,
creating a pocket of open water known asa polynya.

www.geo-web.org.uk

The winds are responsible for making thislocation an ideal spot for Adélie penguins,which have a colony on Inexpressible Island
and at other sites around Terra Nova Bay.
Unlike Emperor penguins, which breed on
the sea ice, Adélie penguins nest on icefree land, which must be accessible to themvia open water and close to their marine
food supply.

This NASA Earth Observatory image was created by Jesse
Allen and Robert Simmon, using EO-1 ALI data provided
courtesy of the NASA EO-1 team and the USGS.

5GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Guy Martin
Receiving Meteosat images via EUMETCastis all too easy these days. Just buy the kit,
software and licence, and everything is
simply laid on a plate for you. But 35 years
ago, when Meteosat-1 represented theabsolute height of technology in the weather
satellite arena, it was a very different matter,as Guy Martin explains.
I have always been interested in weather,mainly because there is always something
to see, something to look forward to. Maybe
the endless summers of 1975/1976 were a
bit boring weather-wise, but generally, ourposition on the eastern edge of the Atlantic
Ocean always throws something new at us.
The first weather satellite I heard of was
ATS-3 which, as I remember, was parked
at 75°W. When there was high pressure to
the west of us, I went to the highest pointon the North Downs, with the best receiver
and antenna I could muster, and I thought
I briefly heard something. Most likely it was
just a few stray electrons that had lost theirway. It was a non-starter.
When Meteosat‑1 was launched, I wrote to
the European Space Agency, not expecting
much of a reply. Imagine my surprisewhen a three quarter inch document witha German postmark fell through the door.
It contained full details on how to receive
images, schedules and everything you
could possibly want. It was produced by
the University of Dundee and gave detailsof their system, even down to the circuit
diagrams of various modules.
AerialMy project to receive Meteosat‑1 began
June 1975. First was the aerial. Consulting
the trusty RSGB manual, I decided on aloop yagi. It was easy to make. I had plentyof plastic covered aluminium strip that wasused for tying cables on to cable trays andthe local hardware shop stocked aluminiumof various shapes and sizes. After somedrilling and riveting and scaling the RSGB
1.3 GHz design, I ended up with a three
metre long loop yagi which was duly fixed
to a wall of the house which, luckily, pointed
due south. A short length of low-loss shf
cable bought the signal into a small upstairs
back room which was my workshop.
ReceiverMy next problem was a receiver. In thosedays there was no easy and cheap accessto shf GAsFETs or MMICs as we have now.
The answer was to do some plumbing andI built an Interdigital mixer, again with somecloning from the RSGB book. Anyone who
has worked in television (the old analogue
variety) will remember vision patch panels
which used
U‑links and Musa cables
for longer jumpers. Musas were made from

6

The author’s home-builtMeteosat Receiversilver coated brass tubes. When unbolted
from the U-section it turned out that they
were exactly the right size for 1691 MHz.
After announcing this discovery around thecoffee table at work, other radio amateurcolleagues found that the cable Musas,
which were slightly longer, were good for
1296 MHz.
The receiver is pictured above, somewhat
cannibalised. On the right was a relay,
switching between two crystals of
97.093 MHz and 97.312 MHz. A 16x
multiplier chain to the right of the Interdigitalmixer multiplied these frequencies to1553.5 MHz and 1557 MHz which, whenmixed with the two available downlink
frequencies, gave an IF of 137.5 MHz. This
became the norm for this type of kit as itenabled it to interface with a VHF orbiting
satellite receiver.
The centre pole of the mixer connected
to a Schottky diode, a bit difficult to find in
those days, but luckily, my workplace was
not adverse to the odd home project. Thisin turn fed through a matching stage anda dual gate FET amplifier. There was also
an LED ‘happy light’ that worked off the DC
generated by the injection frequency; useful
to know it’s all working OK even if you don’t
receive anything.
The VHF section was fairly conventional,
except that the oscillator scanned around137.5 MHz until a signal was received andthen locked on to it using AFC. This system
worked really well, and got around the needfor another crystal to convert down to the IF
of 10.7 MHz. Any converter crystal drift wascancelled out by the local oscillator AFC.
A 30 kHz crystal filter was scrounged fromsome old PMR kit and the IF amplifier was
the tried and trusted CA3089. It was lined
up at work, brought home, and connectedto the aerial; amazingly, it received thesatellite’s tell-tale chirping signal plus a lotof noise.
I could clearly hear the sub-carrier but thenoise was obviously too much for any sortof clear image. I now had to reduce thenoise. A colleague mentioned a phase­‑lockwww.geo-web.org.uk

loop detector, the idea being that, insteadof the whole IF noise bandwidth being
detected, the PLL tracked the signal and thenoise bandwidth was the bandwidth of theloop filter. Through visits to the work library,
local library and book shops, pretending tolook for a book to buy, I eventually learned
how to construct one. It worked fairly well;
the noise was reduced somewhat and a
lot was learned but some sort of preamp
was going to be needed, just a strip line
preamp on fibreglass PCB using two
BFR34 transistors. I couldn’t even find any
Teflon PCB material in small (and cheap)
quantities. Using BFR34s probably wouldn’t
have made much difference anyway.
Although not the ideal choice, it worked,
and now the signal was usable though still
noisy.
Display
How would I display the hoped-for images?.
I found two Muirhead fax machines inthe back of technical stores at work. On
enquiring of the Engineer-in-Charge it
transpired that he thought they had alreadybeen thrown out long ago: so I was given
the job of getting rid of them. On taking
them apart they appeared to have circuitry
for start and stop tones and phasing signals
but the two phase 50 Hz selsyn motor
needed an external drive. The difficult bit,the mechanics were all there; the easy bit,the electronics I could cope with.
At this point some test equipment wasneeded, so I built a WEFAX test unit which
generated start tone, phasing, steppedgrey scale or grille and stop tone. Thesesignals could be output individually or insequence to simulate a picture. It contained
a lot of CMOS chips and became a very
useful piece of kit. All this could, of course,
be done with a single PIC chip these days.
Back then it was Veroboard and lots ofchips.
A decoder was built to get the baseband
signal using a 567 PLL, locking to thesub-carrier and a full wave detector. I also
added a gamma stage to lift the blacks.
Three diodes around a 741 op-amp
with a few resistors improved the image
immensely. The 567 recovered subcarrier
was divided down to 50 Hz to drive themotor circuitry. This consisted of two powertransistors into a backwards toroidal mains
transformer which made an inverter to drive
the 115 V, 50 Hz selsyn motor. It was firedup, start tone arrived, the motor started,
phasing let the helix turn and the pictureappeared on the paper moving sideways
across it.
Arrggh! The machine gearing was for
180 rpm but, in the excitement of the
moment, I failed to check. It should ofMarch 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

course have been 240 rpm. After a little
cursing and head scratching, it dawned
on me that if the motor drive was upped
to 66.6 Hz it would rotate at 240 rpm, and66.6 Hz is easily divided down from the2400 Hz subcarrier to keep everything in
sync. I also managed to buy, very cheaply,
some boxes of paper and writing edges forthe machine. One box was document paper
but two of them contained image paper
which gave nice deep blacks. The image
was produced by passing a current fromthe writing edge, through the paper and into
the rotating helix, which is grounded. Iron
atoms are transferred to the chemical in
the paper, turning it black. The writing edge
wears away and eventually (or sooner withthe use I was giving it) needs replacing.
The pictures were usable but had lots ofspeckles due to the noise in the system.
Dish Antenna
At that time I used to take an excellent
magazine called VHF Communications andthe issue that next dropped through mydoor described how to make a dish fromsheet aluminium. Following another visit to
the aluminium shop and some trigonometry
and careful measuring and drilling of holes,
a 6-foot dish was constructed out of eight
aluminium petals and mounted on the
garage roof. The garage had a flat roof witha good aspect to the south. I saw a design
for a coffee-can feed horn which would haveexactly the right beam width when placedat the focus of this dish. Unfortunately,
American coffee cans are somewhat bigger
than ours and no amount of searching in
B & Q could find a paint tin of the correct
dimensions. There was an excellent nonferrous metal suppliers in Farringdon in
London. I rather cheekily phoned them andasked if they had any 4.25 inch brass tube.
The reply was: ‘of course sir, minimumpurchase is 1 foot’.
I called in and asked for one foot of
4.25 inch brass tube. It took four chaps
to carry this 4-metre length of tube to the
cutting machine, where they sliced off a
one foot length, weighed it and worked

out the price. The piece of tube was cut
to the size of the coffee can, one end wassealed over with copper sheet, and a small
probe was placed inside and connected
to an N-connector. This was placed at thefocus of the dish with a length of low loss
feeder to the receiver and the signal was
absolutely clean. Not a trace of noise to beheard. I had a working Meteosat reception
system.
Framestore
It became apparent that a better display
system was needed. Paper wasn’t readily
obtainable and was not easily archived;
it tended to fade and turn brown. Sepia
prints might have been in fashion once,but not for Meteosat images. In addition,
because Fax machines are not quiet evenwith the workshop door closed, complaints
were received from other members of thehousehold when, for example, tracking
summer thunderstorms moving up from
France at 11.30 pm.
At that time the BBC was beginning to use
a device called a synchroniser to keep
signals from remote cameras in step withthe main cameras. A synchroniser is, inreality, a framestore. I decided to build myown framestore—and a TV monitor to gowith it. At that time there were a numberof electronic shops in the London area, so
a 17-inch tube was purchased together
with ready-made line scan and field scan
modules. I built a video amp, and after a bitof carpentry, soon had a working monitor
in a not very smart wooden box. There
was a junk shop near where I worked thatstocked computer mainframe stuff. He
didn’t seem to sell much except to myself
and my colleagues. I think most of it was
broken up and sold as scrap metal. One
day, he had some large PCB panels fullof 4116 RAM chips, exactly the same asused in the synchronisers. These werepurchased cheaply, and with help from thesynchroniser circuit diagrams, I designed aframestore for Meteosat use. It was quite abit simpler as the signal was monochrome,not colour. Each Meteosat image consistedof 800 lines of 800 pixels. I opted to discard
every fourth pixel and every fourth line,
giving me a 600 line, 600 pixel system
which fitted easily into the CCIR TV
standard. The family was happy. There were
no more clunking noises late at night. And
the fax machines went to their final resting
place quite a bit later than was originallyintended.
Electronic Storage
It was about this time that the BBC B
computer became very popular and it hada large following at work. We had alreadyinterfaced floppy drives to it and there was alarge group of us engaged in doing all sorts
of stuff with it, some of which was evenused for broadcasting purposes.

Unfortunately, none of Guy’s original images has
stood the test of time. The Fax paper actuallydecomposes with age due to the chemicals it
contains. This is the first ever image transmitted
from Meteosat-1 on December 9, 1977.
Image © ESA

One day, the junk shop had in its window
a 40 MB MFM Winchester drive, which
following negotiations, was purchased very
cheaply. This generated great interest at

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GEO Quarterly No 33

work and the management even had ideas
about storing graphics on it. As a result, adelegation returned to the shop to discover
there were six more Winchesters available;
needless to say we bought the lot.
The plan was now to interface these to
BBC computers as a means of archiving
Meteosat images. We learned from acontact in the USA that we required
DTC510B controller cards to interface with
the MFM drives and convert them into SCSI
devices. We returned to the junk shop,
found they had some, and bought six. All
that was needed now were a few chips tointerface the SCSI bus into the BBC B’s
1 MHz bus.
Each controller card had an EPROM onboard, which was configured with the drive
parameters. We had to design and makean EPROM programmer that would workon the computer as well as a UV light box
for erasing the EPROMS. This project
was growing fast, but luckily we had the
management’s blessing (they wanted one
set to use as a caption generator). So thework wasn’t all relegated to lunchtimes.
Eventually one set was complete and we
set about formatting the Winchester. It took
three hours—but got there in the end—and
we had 40 MB of storage. Fantastic in
those days. I could now feed the Meteosat
digitised images into the computer via theuser port and save them on the hard drive(Winchester). Archived material could be
displayed on the TV. No more threats ofbeing banished to the shed.
Final Thoughts
About this time I moved house and there
was no room for the six‑foot dish on thepatio or pitched garage roof. But luck wason my side. The BBC Comms guys asked
me one day if I would like a 4‑foot dish,which of course I accepted. It proved ideal
for my coffee-can feed horn and fitted ona simple frame made of cut down scaffold
tubes.
Soon though, the Timestep downconverterand LNA came along and the 3-metre Yagi
came back into operation, with the LNA
mounted right by its radiating element.
This setup continued right up to the point
where (luckily for us, no so for EUMETSAT)
the satellite power amplifier failed anddissemination was transferred to Hot Bird
the later Eurobird.
Nowadays we are so lucky that receiving
MSG is so easy with an extremely helpful
EUMETCast staff, all components available
off-the-shelf, excellent reasonably priced
software (some even freely available). It’s
just plug and play really, and archiving andhardcopy are no problem. I have to say I
miss the challenge of constructing my own
equipment and brainstorming problems
with colleagues, but dealing with the digital
signals would certainly have proved achallenge. It’s so much easier to pick a feed
off Eurobird and get on with other projects.

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Ed Murashie
Nothing beats seeing the rocket and satellite up close andhearing some behind-the-scenes stories to gain a greaterappreciation for the NPP satellite. Thanks to Bill Sobczak
from the United Launch Alliance team and Tim Trenkle from
Qinetiq, that is exactly what we are going to get to do.
Space Launch Complex-2W tour
Bill, one of the Spacecraft Integrators for the NPP mission,agrees to show us around SLC-2W for an intimate tourof the Delta II. Bill knows this complex well: after all, hehelped modify it! Working for Fairchild Space Company in1973, Bill found himself at Vandenberg AFB and later at
McDonnell Douglas, updating a launch pad for NASA andcommercial space for the Iridium series of satellites. In the
70s and 80s, Bill launched over a dozen Atlas launchers
before he moved to SLC-2, where he has worked since 1985.
Bill saw the rise of the Delta programme when it was NASA’spreferred rocket until its fall in the early 80s when NASA
switched to the shuttle; then its final rise in the late 80s
after the Challenger accident forced NASA to switch back to
expendable rockets.
When asked if he was still as excited to be part of the ULA
team launching rockets today as he was when he started we
get a surprising answer:‘Even more so. Every one is different and every mission
you get so much gratitude when it is successful. It
involves so many companies and people, including
professors who spend their entire lives on experiments,
and when you see it come to fruition and you see theexpressions on their faces and experience the thanks
afterwards it makes you and everyone feel good. It
makes it worth it. It’s a big team effort. Gravity Probe B
for instance, headed by Dr Francis Everitt of thephysics lab at Stanford University, developed an idea
to prove Einstein’s theory about space and time in the
60s and 70s, but there was no way to implement itwith the technology at that time. Eventually we ended
up launching it in 2004, and he proved the theory wascorrect. You also have Google Earth and GPS in yourgolf cart because of all of the satellites we launchedfrom here on Delta and Atlas.’Another enthusiastic ULA team member, Jorge Quintanilla,
Lead Mechanical Engineer, later joins us at the end of
the Delta tour. Jorge got his start at McDonnell Douglas
23 years ago and has been working at Vandenberg AFB
for 14 years. He spent his first nine years working at the
Huntington Beach factory, manufacturing the Delta II
rockets. ‘My first nine years we built the first 100 and thepast 14 years they built the last few’, says Jorge. Jorge
had the pleasure of launching one of the rockets he built.
Both Jorge and Bill have spent time working at the Capesupporting the Delta IIs launches there—but prefer the
California weather.
As we walk up to the security gate we leave ouridentification so that, in case of emergency, they could
account for everyone on the pad. As we walk to the launchpad, Bill points out the RP-1 fuel tank and liquid oxygen(LOX) tank nearby, protected by a blast wall, and also the
500 kW generator.

8

From right to left, Jorge Quintanilla, Bill Sobczak and Ed Murashie.

There are reminders on the public address systemannouncing that there is much activity on the pad. SLC­‑2W
is a government-owned launch pad operated by ULA as acontractor. We learned that the tower is 54 metres tall andwas brought from White Sands in the 70s, where it was used
for the Little Joe II project. When the tower was converted
from Delta use to Delta II use, a 4 metre spacer was added
to the bottom to account for the larger fuel and LOX tanks.
The teal blue 54 metre tall mobile service tower (MST) rolls
back 90 metres eight to nine hours before launch, exposing
the freestanding rocket next
to the fixed umbilical tower.
Yes, it is a freestanding
rocket. Unlike the Delta-IV
and others, the first stage
is set on top, bolted to thelaunch pad, and the nine
GEM solid rocket motors
then attached. The bolts
are removed and the rest of
the rocket is assembled andlaunched unrestrained.
The rocket can withstandwinds up to 75 kph and canbe protected by surrounding
it with the MST, which canwithstand winds of up to
135 kph. ‘Because the MST
acts like a sail, 100 kph
winds can get you sea sickif you stop moving while
Look up from right to left - fixed umbilicalworking on the top levels’,

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The Group for Earth Observation

The ‘business end’ of the GEMs with a larger air ignited one to the left
photo credit NASA/KSC

says Jorge. ‘The launch of P91 was so windy that, when I was
arming the rocket, I saw the vehicle come off one of the six
legs it sits on.’ Bill adds that when the rocket sways during
launch countdown, the engine gimbals compensate for the
movement, just as they would during flight. Jorge tells usthat the Gravity B rocket and workers were on the pad during
an earthquake that shook the site enough to remove one ofthree bumpers fitted between the rocket and tower. Anotheranxious time was when the rocket leaned over slightly whilea solid rocket motor was being attached, because some of thebolts securing the pad were not tight enough.
Bill’s first stop is at the flame trench, where the main engine’s
exhaust vents, and he points to the nearby tank on the hillthat holds 950 000 litres of water. Three minutes before
launch, water starts to pass through three 40 cm pipes to aring surrounding the main engine at a rate of 22 000 litres
per minute. That flow would empty an average swimming
pool in four minutes. The water acts as a sound suppressor,
preventing shock waves from damaging the rocket andpad. The water flows downhill into a pond where it is latercollected, filtered and pumped back into the storage tank.
‘During initial launch, what most people think to be smoke
is actually steam,’ Bill comments. The pad sustains little
damage because of the water, the ablation material that coatssome of the structures and the fact that the rocket takes off
quickly once the solids ignite.
Around the corner we enter the fixed umbilical tower, where
the air conditioning system is located. It provides the clean
cool air that travels up the tower, through tubing to thefairing that surrounds the satellite on top of the rocket. We
quickly move into the MST and come face-to-face with ‘thebusiness end of the rocket’ as Bill and others call it. ‘Flamescome out the bottom and the pointy end is up’. In front of
us are the GEM and main engine nozzles. The first things
we notice are the numbers painted on each GEM. Even
though each GEM is serialised, the factory determines theperformance of each motor, matching them to get the properbalance of thrust, and paints the number on the side. A lot ofplanning goes into the rocket trajectory and timing becauseof the GEMs. First, they are held on to longer than launches
at the Cape, because the controllers need to make sure theydrop into the ocean at a prescribed location—not on top of
the oil platforms off the California Coast. Because of theflames during launch, the three air ignited GEMs have covers
in the nozzles to protect them; these get blown off when theyignite. The flight characteristics of these ‘Kevlar Frisbees’
have been studied and weights are added to ensure theyland somewhere where they will not hurt someone or damage
property. When the GEM casings land in the ocean they
immediately break up, sink to the bottom of the ocean andbecome fish habitat.

GEO Quarterly No 33‘The first mile is the toughest,’ says Bill, where it takes
over 4000 kN of total thrust with 3000 kN coming from thesolids to overcome the 227 tonne launch mass. Without the
GEMs, the Rocketdyne RS-27A main engine would not haveenough thrust to lift the rocket off the pad. Having readthat fir wood was used in the Atlas rocket [1], a question israised when seeing what looks to be a wooden patch on a
GEM; this is because the GEMs and portions of the rocket
body are covered with cork, covered by fire retardant epoxy.
Cork is the best insulator to handle the aero heating over1000 degrees. Other things we see are the six points that
support the rocket, one of which pulls away just at launchso that it does not interfere with the main engine’s turbine
exhaust. Before we leave, we look at the RS-27A main engine,which controls the rocket pitch and yaw, and the two small
Rocketdyne vernier engines mounted on opposite sides of therocket. These verniers control the rocket’s roll and attitude
so that the onboard telemetry antennas point towards theground receivers while in flight.
The next stop is level-2 of the MST. To get there we haveto climb a few stairs since they did not extend the elevatorto the ground when they added the 4 metre section to thetower. Levels A, B and C are the added lower levels: level-1
is just above the GEMs, level-2 is above the centre of thebody, level­‑3 houses the changing room and a guard which
limits access to the clean rooms in the levels above, level‑4is the second stage and levels‑5 and ‑6 are the payload area.
Level‑6 has the ability to be raised or lowered to match the
payload requirements. When the elevator doors open, we
immediately see the blue rocket body with the 2 m high NPP
decal above the NASA logo. The nine-section decal is rolled
on to the rocket body at the factory when it is in a horizontal
position. A tunnel runs along the side of the rocket andBill explains that it contains the electrical wires and linear
explosive charge that would split the rocket open during adestruct sequence.

Bill Sobczak standing next to the NPP logo

Riding the elevator up to the level‑3, we step outside and,from 28 metres above the launch pad, we have a magnificent
view of the California Coast, the nearby Atlas Abres launch
pad and Astrotech, where the satellite is being processed.
What a view! We re-enter at the interstage level where the4-metre section houses the second stage nozzle. Peering into
the darkness of the interstage through a clear port on theside of the rocket, we can just barely make out the nozzle
that fill most of the 2.5 metre diameter interstage. One more
step outside on the other side of the MST and we are now
looking at netting extended out from the Fixed UmbilicalTower. ‘When the rocket is launched and the umbilical cables
are pulled, you don’t want them to hit the structures—so theyland in this catch net, which protects them so we don’t haveto rebuild them,’ Bill comments.

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

The view from Level 3. Ocean to the right, MST rails center bottom and Astrotech in the distance on the horizon.

Taking the elevator up to the 5th floor, we first stop on level‑4
to put on our clean-room booties. As the elevator door opens
we finally see the top of the rocket body. Bill points to themetal structure on top of the rocket, with its electrical boxes
and wiring, explaining that this is the navigation system;
on top of this structure is also where the payload fitting(PAF) and satellite will attach. As we look around, we see theadjustable level‑6 and the two-piece fairing, which had beencleaned and bagged.
We head down the elevator, pick up our badges again, andhead to the conference room where we will sit down andask Bill and Jorge our many questions. We ask how long a
mission takes and are told that typically, Bill would startworking with the customer to define the rocket specifications
and requirements two years in advance. NPP took a little
longer, with first contacts made in 2004 before the project
was put on hold.
Entering the conference room, we can understand why ULA
is a rewarding place to work: the walls are decorated withphotos of the many successful missions, and rocket models
stand in the corner. With the launch’s excellent 98.7%
success rate, Bill quickly says, ‘We are only as good as ourlast launch. For the next one, with over 10,000 componentsthat have to work on every launcher, you only get one
chance’. Asking about the team of engineers who come out
from the factory to work on the rocket, Jorge comments thatone person comes out to make sure the rocket gets delivered
properly, but that is it. We get a sense that what makes the
Delta II work well is consistency and competency. They were
all built with only minor changes, like the fairing materialand solid rocket motors. This is what allows Jorge to be
familiar with each one. ‘Iridium made records launching
eleven rockets in one and a half years from SLC-2W’, Bill
adds.
Asking about the competitors, Bill comments: ‘We have seen
new businesses starting up, they don’t find it easy and wewish them the best. This isn’t an easy business. In general,competition makes us better too. We remain on our toes’.
Asking what is next for ULA after the end of the Delta-II,
Bill responds on having the Delta-IV and possibly making
a rocket man-rated (capable of carrying humans) now thatthey don’t have the shuttle. It would not be the first timeto have done man-rated rockets: look at Mercury with theAtlas, Gemini with the Titan II and SkyLab and Apollo with
the Saturn. Inquiring what happens between missions andhow he keeps busy, Jorge explains that immediately after alaunch, when the pad is still hot, they hose it down to remove
the corrosives then thoroughly inspect it. After the pad is10

secure there are other tasks, like off-loading new equipment
for the next launch. Other tasks are pad maintenance, which
include constantly painting the tower. It is like the Golden
Gate Bridge—by the time you get to one end it is time to startat the other end again; but they have a standard workweek
with the weekends off.
Jokingly, we ask if there are any traditions, like lining up
stuffed animals at the end of the flame trench at the Cape.
Jorge finally relates that the pad technicians cut Lead Pad
Engineer Tom Knowles’ tie before tower roll back to preventa launch scrub turnaround, and that another person grows
and serves dill pickles in the control room during a launch.
Bill comments: ‘Occasionally a launch manager brings theStaples’ “That’s Easy” button and presses it right after thelaunch or spacecraft separation to break the tension.
‘The final ten minutes, until the last 7 seconds (when green
board is announced), is always a tense time’ during a launch,no matter how many times you have been through one, says
Bill. Jorge adds, ‘Every one is different and leaves a memory
imprint’.
Walking away, we realize that what makes the Delta program
so successful is not only the consistent hardware, but also
the totally dedicated and enthusiastic employees who love
their job. Veterans like Bill and Jorge, plus their impressive
launch team members, will keep ULA successful now and in
the future.
Astrotech TourTim Trenkle is a Launch Site Support Engineer with Qinetiq,
contracted by NASA Kennedy Space Center to oversee theNASA operations at Vandenberg. Tim agreed to show us
around Astrotech, a commercial facility contracted by KSC
to process the NPP satellite before it was attached to the
Delta-II rocket. Tim, a veteran like Bill, with over 30 years ofexperience in the satellite field, is very familiar with the NOAA
weather satellites. He worked at the RCA Astro Electronics
Company in East Windsor New Jersey, where the firstweather satellite was designed before being transferred to the
Lockheed facility in Sunnyvale. He was even involved with thelast NOAA satellite, NOAA-N’, and points out the old NASAfacility nearby that has processed the NOAA satellites since
the 60s.
Astrotech is one of two facilities with which NASA bids forsatellite processing, SSI on south base being the other.
Exiting Tim’s office, we learn that about a dozen Astrotech
employees and 20-40 visiting personnel from the spacecraft
team are there at various times. Tim indicates the buildingson the other end of the property and comments that there

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The Group for Earth Observation

they have the HighBay East, HighBay West andHigh Bay Airlock.
Next door is a newtaller bay, added a
few years ago, forother Vandenberg
missions. The
airlock in front of
the west high bay
provides accessto the east andwest high bays.
We arrive at the
airlock just as thepayload transporter
arrives; this will
carry the satellite
from the west highbay to the launch
pad some threekilometres away. As
they start to roll up
the high bay airlock
Tim Trenkle Backfilling Nitrogen Tanks
door, Tim points
to the large bagged cylinder stack already in the airlock,commenting that it is the can that will protect the satelliteon the journey to the pad. We learn that, when the satellite
is ready, it will be bagged, loaded into the cylinder, placed on
the transporter and driven at 8 kph maximum speed to thelaunch pad some 3 km away. Cylinders of nitrogen on thetransporter will keep about 480 kPa of positive pressure in
the can. This will keep contaminates out and the satellite freeof moisture.

GEO Quarterly No 33

18 x 12 m, 13.5 m tall west high bay clean room. Stepping
up to the window, we see the NPP satellite on its stand, tilted
up and draped with a semi transparent bag. Mike informs
us that the satellite is ready to go, pointing out each of
the instruments and the star sensors that help orient the
spacecraft while in orbit. Tim points out the nitrogen panel
and lines that are purging some of the instrument cavities
and bags which keep moisture out of the area. He also
indicates the hazardous vapour monitor that has been in use
since the spacecraft was fueled. We talk about the smooth
34-hour truck ride from Boulder, Colorado and the shock
sensors that monitored the ride. Ending our discussion in thecontrol room, we talk about how the spacecraft is attachedto the payload adapter ring, which was already in the cleanroom. Tim informs us that it uses a four-bolt tie-down systemwith four springs and a secondary latch system that gently
push the spacecraft from the Delta-II during separation.
When asked about Ball Aerospace, Mike shares: ‘It is afriendly atmosphere where everybody knows everybody; it has
2400 employees but everybody works together as a team, one
person picking up the slack for the other’. He mentions thatthey have added another clean room in Boulder to remaincompetitive with the bigger companies, and are working to getbigger satellites.
We say goodbye, wishing Mike good luck on the launch.
Walking back to the office with Tim, we stop by a trailer
filled with nitrogen cylinders. Mike hops up into the trailer
and checks one set of cylinders, observing that they are onlyat 5500 kPa. He opens a valve to back fill them from the17000 kPa bottles. ‘We use grade C nitrogen gas for tighter
moisture and hydrocarbon specs,’ Tim says. Saying ourgoodbyes, we ask what’s next after NPP and Tim informs usof the NuStar satellite on a Pegasus next year.

Mike Lyons, overseeing the operation, is a Senior
Manufacturing Engineer for Ball Aerospace which built the
spacecraft bus and the Ozone Mapper Profiler Suite. Mikehas worked on four spacecraft busses in the past ten years.
‘It is exciting, having started working on NPP ten years ago,
to be pulled off for a while and then to come back. It wasgood to see the initiation of this and its final closure’, Mike
comments. He was generous enough to allow us into the west
control room, located behind the west high bay. From there,
we see a large window in the opposite wall opening to the

NPP in the Astrotech VAFB West High Bay with the control room
window in the lower left. Photo credit Ball Aerospace

Having joined us on this tour, meeting and being educated by
the dedicated folks working on the NPP mission, I hope you
have learned a thing or two and can now appreciate what it
takes to get NPP off the ground.
Postscript
On an exceptionally clear California night on October 28,
2011, NPP was successfully launched from Vandenberg at
2:48 am PDT. The launch lit up the area and could be seen
jettisoning it’s solid rocket motor and main engine cutoff.
The author is sincerely grateful to all who provided theopportunity to become educated on the NPP and Delta-II
rocket. Thank you.
Reference
NPP transporter and the transport can leave to go to the launch pad
Photo credit NASA/KSC

1 http://ulalaunch.com/site/pages/Education_FunFacts.shtml

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Francis Bell
Regular readers will recall that I sometimes report on my travels,and if possible publish any satellite image I receive using my mobile
APT station. I have reduced the size and weight of my kit so thatthe wire turnstile, receiver and recorder all fit into a suitcase withoutcompromising room for normal holiday luggage.
In November 2011 we visited Indonesia for a cruise, together withplanned visits to the islands of Java, Flores, Bali, West Timor andKomodo: and yes, we did see the Komodo Dragons. Every island
was magical, not only for the natural beauty but also the opportunity
to meet the friendly people. Throughout the our 19-day visit theweather we experienced was perfect: an occasional thunderstorm,
but otherwise hot and sunny. This part if the world is part of the
Pacific ‘Ring of Fire’, and there were volcanoes everywhere, somedangerously active: 35 died when Kelut erupted in 1990 and there
were a further 138 fatalities during the Merapi eruption in November
2010.
On the subject of disasters, two struck the area soon after weleft. Cyclone Sendong struck Mindanao in the Philippines, killinghundreds of people. In another incident, a boat reportedly carrying
350 refugees was lost while sailing across the Flores Sea, an area
we had serenely navigated about a week previously.
While cruising, I scarcely had an opportunity of establishing my APT
station on board the ship. I was not too fussed about this because
so many other interesting activities had priority. However, after thecruise had finished we had a three-day stopover on the island ofBali, in a hotel with extensive gardens and beach access. I naïvely
thought I would set up my APT station outside the hotel with a clear
view of the sky. The reality was that, with the discomfort of 35°C
and 100% humidity, I couldn’t trust myself to assemble my stationout of doors, let alone sit nearby waiting for a suitable satellite pass.
On the last day of our stay I judged that, if I were to receive any
sort of satellite image, I had to take the softer option and assemble
my equipment in the cool comfort of the hotel room. This idea
was extremely speculative because, although I had access to theroom’s balcony where I could locate the station, I had no idea ofthe extent to which the building might obscure any weather satellite
signals. I had no option but to try. Success: exactly as predicted,
NOAA 19 very cooperatively crossed the sky visible from the west
facing balcony. If the balcony had faced any other direction, or I had
tried for the previous satellite pass, I would have received almost
nothing.

Francis with two new friends. The attractive girls were alsotalented, and wanted to practice their English on visitors.
Both girls plan to be teachers when they grow up.

A volcano close to the north coast of Bali - part of the Ring of Fire

Considering the circumstances, I was astonished with APT image
which I did manage to record with my Heath Robinson set-up
propped up on the edge of a hotel balcony among its hanging
shrubs. The image was far from perfect but for a one-off opportunity
I was pleased with the result. The received APT image shows,curving from top left to bottom right, the Malay peninsula, theislands of Samoa, Java, Sumba, Flores and Timor plus otherislands.
For a comparison image
which includes the same areathat I recorded, see page 16
of GEO Quarterly 32, wherean image from Fred van den
Bosch is displayed. Fred’s
image was received at his
new home in Vietnam.
For a brief review oftyphoons over thePhilippines, refer to page 18
of GEO Quarterly 32.

12

The satellite receiving station on the firstfloor hotel balcony.

NOAA 19 image received from Bali at 14.20 local time December 4, 2011www.geo-web.org.uk

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Mike Stevens
Living here on Portland can have great
advantages, especially in the summer
months: lots of blue sky and blue sea.
But in the winter it’s a different story:
strong to gale force winds and heavy
rain with salt laden air coming on to theIsland which, as you can imagine, isvery corrosive to antennas and satellite
dishes. To date I have changed threesatellite dishes and four TV antennas
and had to repair a couple of amateur
radio antennas.
So, when it was time to replace my
65 cm EUMETSAT dish, which was
rapidly disintegrating, I had to decide
what type and size of replacement topurchase.
At the time, I had just applied for an
Envisat License, and most articles
explaining the system seemed tosuggest a 1.2 m dish. But I am on
the extreme south coast, with a clear
take-off in all directions except north,so would I need a dish that size? I
decided on a 1-metre dish, along with astand I could bolt down to the patio toprevent it from being blown over in thewinter gales. These, and a twin output
LNB, were promptly ordered from theSatellite Shop and were delivered withina couple of days.

This Envisat MERIS image of Crete was captured by the author,
using his twin-LNB antenna, at 08:55 UT on October 20, 2011.
Image courtesy ESA

Having read an article by Arne Van
Belle in GEO Quarterly [1], I realisedthat it was possible, with a lot ofdelicate adjustment, that I might beable to receive two satellites from thesame dish, so the 1-metre dish should
prove OK for both satellites. Great!
Decision made.
The kit arrived and construction
began: nothing complicated at all. It’sa large dish, but it fitted together very
well. I then drilled holes to match themounting bracket in the patio andbolted the bracket down securely.
Then I had to mount the dish on thebracket, which was a bit more complex
because of its size and shape. But a bitof holding, while tightening bolts at thesame time, eventually secured the dishto the mounting bracket. That was theeasy part: dish alignment was next andthat was to prove very tricky indeed.
I have described this alignment
procedure before in a previous article [2],but that was with just a single
output LNB. This time I planned topermanently instal a dish fitted witha twin LNB to feed two DVB World
receivers. My first operation involved
setting up the dish using EUMECasttransmissions from the Eurobird 9A

This Envisat MERIS image shows Cyprus, and was captured at 08:04 UT on September 5, 2011.
Image courtesy ESA

This Envisat MERIS image showing Sicily was captured at 09:18 UT on September 22, 2011.
Image courtesy ESA

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GEO Quarterly No 33

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March 2012satellite at 9°E, as this satellite has the stronger
signal. I located 9°E using a compass, adjusted
for the local magnetic variation and set thesatellite dish to this mark. Immediately, mymeter shot to full scale deflection and, when I
opened up the DVB World receiver (which was
already programmed for EUMETCast reception),
the signal strength was 100% with quality at
85%. That was perfect—but how would it shapeup once I had located the Eutelsat W1 satellite at
10°E.
The next part of the operation was locating
Eutelsat W1, basically a one-degree move. Easy
you might say! But not so simple when it has amuch weaker signal.
In Arne’s article, he stated that the optimal
distance between the 9°E and 10°E LNBs should
be 17 mm when using a 1-metre, standard
offset dish, so this was a good starting point. I
drew a line beneath the LNB arm to the center
point of the mounting bracket then, immediately
below the LNB, I measured out 17 mm and drew
another line back to the centre point, I thenhad a small angle which when checked with acompass was 1 degree.
I then turned on the DVB World (alreadyprogrammed for Eutelsat), moved the dish arm toa point directly over my new mark (17mm awayfrom the first one), I had a signal immediately.
I used a TV Broadcast station (Press TV), andthis was giving me a signal strength of 90% andquality of 80%. It was then time to switch that
off and start the IP button. As soon as this wasdone I had a signal from the Envisat station at
78% signal strength and 60% quality, with data
coming in.
The author’s 1-metre dish fitted with the twin LNB

I then rechecked the signal from Eurobird 9, andwas amazed at the results: I had 95% signal
strength and 60% quality. I checked all thecoordinates again to be sure then locked thesatellite dish securely.
So there it was, two satellites being received on asingle 1­metre dish, both with very good reception.
I have been monitoring the signals for quite afew months now and having the larger dish for
EUMETCast has been a great benefit as I know
longer lose signal strength when it rains. Also,
the Eutelsat signal remains fairly constant. There
are a few anomalies during the day but, by andlarge, its signal strength remains constant.
So, to sum up, what I have is a single 1­‑metre
satellite dish, ground mounted, with atwin output LNB. One LNB feed goes to the
EUMETCast system receiver connected to my AcerPC, and handles the complete system without
a RAMDisk; the other feed serves the Eutelsat/
Envisat system on my E-Machine PC. Bothsystems work in conjunction with one anotherwith no problems at all. Additionally, my dishis on the ground and more sheltered from thedamaging winter gales.
When I presented this article to you previously,some of the information was omitted. My
apologies for that. I hope this update clarifies
the installation that I have and how I arrived
at it. If you too are receiving both EUMETCast
and Envi-Ham data, do give this a try. You may

14

A close-up view of the twin LNB

be surprised at what you can achieve. And as you can see above, thepictures are stunning. Happy weather watch from Portland. My thanks
to David Taylor and Arne Van Belle for the excellent articles on Envisat
reception: they helped me a lot.
References
1 A New Challenge: GEOQ 29, page 21
2 Envi-Ham DDS with Windows XP: GEOQ 30, page 43

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The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Esko Petäjä
The background to this article is my need to have a better signal
measurement system to align my Envisat and EUMETCast
antennas for satellite reception. Most users do this using software
supplied with their DVB reception hardware. Such software typicallyshows signal level and quality as a percentage: very seldom dothey show the real values. There are units you can purchase which
will show real values and provide a spectrum display, but they are
generally very expensive.
As a radio amateur, I have been studying ways to transmit digital
pictures by radio. During this study I discovered an interestingmeasurement tool that can be used with Digital Amateur Television(DATV) using DVB-S. Jean Pierre Courjaud (F6DZP) has
developed a software tool named Tutioune for the reception andmeasurement of DATV. Tutioune also incudes a Web Monitor facility
which receives data from individual stations and displays picturesand signal levels on a Google Map. Originally, this was developed
so that radio amateurs could share their signal levels and
QSL pictures on the Internet, but I have been using it in weather
satellite reception to show my Envisat receiving status online aswell as my most recently received image.
The Basics of Satellite Transmission
The theoretical maximum signal power output from acommunications satellite, its equivalent isotropically radiated power(EIRP), is only realised in the direction of maximum antenna gain.
Even then, many factors can reduce the received power, such as• the distance the signal has to travel from satellite to receiver• attenuation if the signal travels through rainfall• unwanted RF noise received at the antenna

Tutioune v 1.0 can be downloaded from the website of Jean Pierre
Courjaud at
http://www.vivadatv.org/index.php

but, unless you are reasonably proficient in French, you willprobably feel more at home with the English version at
http://www.vivadatv.org/viewtopic.php?f=60&t=104

On the same page you will find links to the tutioune.ini file, thebridge driver software and files needed for the video display featureof the program.
There is also an on-line guide to Tutioune, in English, at
http://www.vivadatv.org/viewtopic.php?f=61&t=105

In order to download the program, you must first join the Viva DATV
forum (which is free) and log in. First, you have to download andinstall the special SAA7146A PCI bridge driver software, then you
can download and install Tutioune itself. Full instructions for all thisappear on the website. The first time you run Tutioune, the image
illustrated in figure 4 is displayed on your PC display.
I use the TT S2-3200 DBV-S2 reception card, which has an
STB 0899 demodulator and an SAA 7146A PCI bridge which
manage communication from the card to the Windows software
application. The SAA Bridge driver allows the software to read morevariables from the demodulator and tuner than a standard driver.

EIRP is measured in dBw (decibels relative to one watt), andsatellite operators publish charts where this power is plotted on the
Earth’s surface. Figure 1 shows such a chart for Eurobird 9A.

Figure 2 - The basic architecture of the Tutioune system

As will be explained later, the Tutioune software shows various
parameters related to the received signal, and its Web Monitor
feature can display the signal status and last received image frommy station on to the Web.

Figure 1 - EIRP chart for Eurobird 9A

Signals are attenuated during transmission. Attenuation depends
on the location of the ground station: stations here in the north(Finland) lie farther from the satellite, which means that attenuation
is greater. If the signal passes through rain, the attenuation
becomes greater still. Additionally, the antenna also receives
background noise from the atmosphere, the ground and the LNB,
the most noise coming from the ground. All this means that astation in the north, where the elevation angle of the satellite is low,
receives a noisier signal than a station farther south. Signal quality
depends on the ratio between the received signal and the noiselevel.

My reception and measurement system is shown diagrammaticallyin figure 3. Following the antenna, a splitter divides the signal
between the Envisat reception system and the Tutiounemeasurement software. My Envisat system consists of a Technisat
reception card and the EnviHamBrowse software developed by
Francis Breame, which converts files into JPG format. Additionally, italso saves the last received image as a file which can then be sent

Tutioune
Tutioune is a newly developed software utility, specially developed
to provide DVB technicians with a tool that allows precise
measurement and display of Digital ATV (DVB-S) signals. The
program can be used with a number of DVB-S PCI satellite receivercards, such as the TechnoTrend TT-S2-3200.
www.geo-web.org.uk

Figure 3 - Schematic of the author’s system

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The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Figure 4 - The Tutioune main screen with Envisat and EUMETCast settingsfrom Tutioune to the Web Monitor, where it can seen by others. The
Tutioune measurement system is connected to the signal splitter
through a DC-blocking capacitor, so that it can only be used as ameasuring and monitoring station. In order to analyse the signal,
Tutioune must be tuned separately to the received frequency,
which, for Envisat, is 2021 MHz.
There is a lot information available on the Tutioune measuringsystem but I will only discuss the most important features:• tuning frequency and symbol rate, and how to
configure the Tutioune.ini file• the meanings of basic reception parameters andhow to use the measuring panel• publishing information using Web Monitor.

Figure 5
Manual Frequency Tuning

Figure 6
Manual Symbol Rate Tuning

Figure 7a
Default Preset Buttons

Figure 7b
Programmed Preset Buttons

More information can be found on Jean Pierre’s website at
http://www.vivadatv.org

Tuning Frequency, Symbol Rate and the Tutioune.ini File
Tuning frequency can be done manually by simply entering
the required frequency in the green box of the frequency panel(figure 5). Tuning the symbol rate can similarly be accomplishedusing the green box in the symbol rate panel (figure 6).
In order to make the use of Tutioune more convenient for daily use,
you must, of course, supply the software with all the parameters
relevant to Envisat and EUMETCast. Panels on the Tutioune
display allow the user to input this information but, if you wish
to make regular checks, this can become a tedious process.
Fortunately, Tutioune solves this problem through its accompanying
Tutioune.ini file, which you can edit with the parameters you require.
Tutioune will then load these parameters every time you run thesoftware, and they can be activated by clicking one of the preset
buttons.
Figure 7a shows the panel of presets as it appears when you
run Tutioune for the first time. Each carries a dummy name orfrequency such as SR0001, Freq1, etc. The right-hand set of
buttons relates to the frequency of the named satellite. If you
click on one of these buttons, you will see the ‘Frequency’ field infigure 5 update. The left-hand set of buttons is used to select the
Symbol Rate for the satellite. If you click one of these buttons, youwill see the ‘SymbolRate’ field in figure 6 update. The captions
I edited into the Tutioune.ini file appear in figure 7b. The set ofvariables I edit into my Tutioune.ini file are listed in Table 1.

16

SR1Text = SREnvi
SR2Text = SREumet SR3Text = SRCCTV
SR1Value = 5732
SR2Value = 27500
SR2Value = 27500
Freq1Text= FQEnvi
Freq2Text= FQEumet Freq3Text= FQCCTV
Freq1Value = 2021000 Freq2Value = 1377000 Freq3Value = 1911000
Fec12=0
Fec23=0 Fec34=1
Fec56=1 Fec67=0
Fec78=0
Table 1
The author’s Tutioune.ini parameters for Envisat, EUMETCast and CCTV

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The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Figure 8a - The Measuring Panel displaying Medium Reception Correction

Figure 8b - The Measuring Panel displaying Low Reception Correction

Figure 9
QPSK Modulation (top)and a Constellation
showing modulation error(circled red at bottom)

Figure 11 - Google Map

Figure 10
The Author’s Web Monitor Display

http://www.vivadatv.org/tutioune.php?om_id=OH6MQM&station_id=1

Figure 12 - Station Panel

Figure 13: Panel for last received Envisat picturewww.geo-web.org.uk

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

The Basic Reception Parameters
The Measuring Panel (figure 8) allows you to keep track of anumber of important parameters related to reception.
RF Power (dBm)
The unit for RF Power is the dBm, which is an abbreviation
for the power ratio in decibels (dB), of the measured power,referenced to one milliwatt (mW).
IQ levelThis graph allows you to see the digital IQ level inside thedemodulator by displaying the level of the IQ signal
MER (dB)
MER is a measure used to quantify the performance of a radiotransmitter or receiver in a communications system using digitalmodulation. The demodulated and detected signal can beused as a reasonably reliable estimate for the ideal transmitted
signal in the MER (modulation error ratio) calculation. TheETSI ETR 290 DVB measurement guidelines state that MER
is the best overall method for determining the signal quality.
Although bit error rate (BER) has been widely addressed as animportant digital transmission measurement in this context, MER
provides a much earlier indication of transmission impairments.
Constellation
In DBV-S ‘SR’ is the number of Symbols received per second.
In DVB-S QPSK modulation, each Symbol can be considered
as a couple (I,Q) corresponding to a point in the constellations
diagram (figure 9: top). Each of the positions in the four quadrantsof the constellations-diagram can be decoded as 00, 01, 10
or 11. In good decoding, each point will be close to the centreof its quadrant; if reception is poor, the points are more widelydispersed.
MER calculates this dispersion. Figure 9: bottom, shows how
the symbols are located in quadrants, and the modulation error
where the points are dispersed. The red circle in the upper rightquadrant illustrates the modulation error.
Working Principle of Corrections
Reed–Solomon (RS) correction consists of non-binary cyclic
error-correcting codes invented by Irving S Reed and Gustave
Solomon. They described a systematic way of building codesthat could detect and correct multiple random symbol errors.
The Viterbi decoder uses the Viterbi algorithm for decoding a
bitstream that has been encoded using forward error correction.
Viterbi decoding was developed by Andrew J Viterbi 1967. In the
final panel of figure 8, ‘Vber’ describes the percentage of packets
that are being Viterbi corrected.
Using the Panel for Signal Measurement
The measurement panel works under different measuringconditions, as explained below.
If the signal level goes down, you can see from the panels that,when MER falls, the constellations clouds disperse. First, theViterbi corrector begins to work and you can see the number ofbits corrected by Viterbi growing. When the Viterbi method can’t
correct all the Symbols it receives, the Reed Solomon corrector
starts up to add a further correction. When the numbers of bits
corrected becomes too high, it signifies that Viterbi and Reed
Solomon cannot correct the entire stream and the value of ‘Vber’is high.
Figure 8a shows an example of medium reception. RF power is-61 dBm, S/N MER = 10.0 dB, the Constellation points are close
together and only Viterbi correction is active (Vber = 0%).
Figure 8b gives an example of low reception. The RF poweris -78 dBm and S/N MER is only 4.5 dB. The Constellation
points are widely dispersed with both Viterbi and Reed Solomoncorrection in action (Vber = 12%). In this state, the system is very
near to losing reception completely.

March 2012

Publishing Information using Web Monitor
I use Web Monitor to publish signal information and my lastreceived picture on the Web. The Viva DATV website includes a
Google Map showing all stations that have been registered by theirusers.
http://www.vivadatv.org/tutioune.php?what=map

If the station is actively sending data to the Viva DATV website,
the icon will be green: a red icon means that the station is not
currently active. At the time of writing, my station is the only one
operating from Finland. Figure 11 shows my station on the map. If
you click on my location icon, you can view my Web Monitor display(figure 10) when the station is active.
You can also access my Web Monitor directly fromhttp://www.vivadatv.org/
tutioune.php?om_id=OH6MQM&station_id=1

Setting up the Web Monitor
To set up the Web Monitor you must
• configure the web setting in the Tutioune.ini file• start Web Monitor, and• activate web picture sending.
The first thing you need to do to get the Web Monitor working is toedit your Tutioune.ini file correctly. The most important things are
OM_ID and ForumPassword which need to be same as the ID andpassword you use to log into the Viva DATV forum.
Table 2 lists all the information I edited into the [WebMonitoring]
section of my Tutioune.ini file in order to operate the Web Monitor.
OM_ID
ForumPassword
Station_ID1
Locator
Ville
DirectionAntenne
GainAntennedB
GainPreamplidB

Your Viva DATV forum ID
Your Viva DATV forum password
1Your radio callsign
Your home town/location
1.2 (dish diameter in metres)
4300

Table 2
Additional Tutioune.ini parameters needed for the Web Monitor

Parameters written into the Tutioune.ini file can be seen in the‘Station’ panel. Web Monitor is started by clicking the Web button
in figure 12. If the settings are correct, then the LgMsg parametershould show a value in the range 1300-1500, as shown in figure 12.
To be able to send my last received picture into Web Monitor, it isnecessary to:• set the Photo, QSL and Web buttons as shown in figure 13• add additional information, which can be written into the‘Station’ and ‘infos’ fields.
• place the TiouneQSL.jpg image in the same folder in which
the application is installed (this image can be automaticallygenerated by using EnviHamBrowse).
(Detailed information about this can be found from the
EnviHamBrowse documentation).
Using Web Monitor
My station Web Monitor (figure 10) shows the parameters explained
earlier. Additionally, signal levels can be seen according to time.
Tuner Cards that can be used with Tutioune
Tutioune needs a card that has an STB0899 demodulator and
SAA7146A interface chip. The The Technisat TT-S2-3200 card that
I use is very sensitive and can receive IP data, which means that it
is suitable for Envisat and EUMETCast data reception. Older cards
like the now obsolete Technisat Skystar 2 PCI are less sensitive
and are not so suitable for this purpose.
... continued on page 42

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The Group for Earth Observation

On Christmas Day 2011, a depression in the Bay of Bengal started
to deepen rapidly and, during the subsequent 24 hours, developed
into Cyclonic Storm Thane. By December 28, Thane had become
Very Severe Cyclonic Storm Thane, the only such storm to hit theregion all year. Equivalent to a category one hurricane on the Saffir-

GEO Quarterly No 33

Simpson Hurricane Scale, Thane produced sustained windspeedsof 120 kph. Winds finally peaked on December 29, with winds of
150 kph, just as the Metop satellite pictured the cyclone skirting thenorthern tip of Sri Lanka on its way to making landfall on the northTamil Nadu coast near Cuddalore, southeast of Puduchery.

Data from the 04:25 UT Metop­‑A pass on December 29, 2011, received over EUMETCast by David Taylor's Metop
Manager, was used to combine two 3-minute chunks into a single image, processed for display by his HRPT Reader
software. The southern tip of India, and part of the island of Sri Lanka can be seen at the centre of the image.

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

Robert Moore

The two screens show EUMETCast data in various formats

In the previous issue of GEO Quarterly I gave readersa quick look at my set up for receiving weather satellite
data; this time I will outline how I use the data. Most of us
receive far more data than we can actually use and we are
therefore selective in what we eventually process. Thinking
about my own approach, I use the data in three modes.
The first is in a flush of enthusiasm as a new data stream—or new visualisation software—becomes available. This
tends to be a rapidly passing phase and can result in some
software being moved from the desktop to a ‘Less Used’
folder, because it does not make regular or significant
contributions to my everyday requirements
My second mode of viewing weather satellite data might
be characterised as starting from the question: ‘What is
the weather doing today?’. To answer this question, anddepending on the time of day, I will look at either the latest
high resolution or infrared image of the UK. This I will thenwiden to the North Atlantic with the latest MSLP chart
overlaid. A North Atlantic 72-frame animation of infrared
RSS images is an essential adjunct to this, to indicate
the likely arrival or departure of cloud cover or frontal
systems. A quick look at all these data, plus the MSLP
chart from Northwood, often precedes an expedition to
the hills, or a long drive—or deciding whether it is worth
getting the astronomical telescope set up before dark.
Sometimes, usually in the evening, I will then go for a bitof a tour, looking at the weather in the South Tyrol (where
my son and his family live), or in Gujerat (where I havetaught, and have friends); the Himalayas, which I fear I

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The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

will never see from ground level; Newfoundland or the Kamchatka
peninsula which are both normally wreathed in cloud and therefore‘hard to see’. Occasionally I will send pictures from my ‘tour’ to
the GEO Quarterly Editor. If there are active hurricanes I will
occasionally follow them in an ad hoc way. But these latter usesof the data are really just curiosity—which can, nevertheless, leadto some interesting observations and recourse to Google Earth or
textbooks, and unscheduled late nights!

It will not have escaped readers notice that I have made noreference to high resolution HRPT imagery from the NOAA
satellites, Metop or MODIS. I find these images fascinating, butmainly in my ‘touring’ mode. The high resolution images fromEUMETCast, and my own NOAA reception, do however comeinto their own when there is vigorous convection over the UK,
because one can usually pick out the towering cumulus clouds anddeveloping ‘anvils’.

One subsidiary, but for me, extremely interesting issue, is the local
weather. I have water on two sides, the River Dee to the north-east
and the Irish Sea to the north-west. The map overleaf indicates mylocation

Perhaps, as an academic, I may add one final comment to thesenotes: there are very interesting parallels between meteorology andthe social sciences. In neither can we conduct experiments, in both
we deal, in the end, with probabilities. Both progress with advancesin theory, data acquisition and methods of analysis; each aspect
stimulates and challenges the others. But a breakthrough in one isof limited value on its own. While it’s not quite as simple as this, I
am constantly struck by the parallels between my day time job andmy hobby—and if I wished to stretch a point I might argue that timespent on the hobby is time well spent because of this. But I don’t,
because I enjoy it.

The water keeps us a little warmer in the winter, which is when I
become particularly interested in the sea surface temperature data.
Late summer and autumn 2011 saw a series of very short­­‑lived
and violent rain storms sweep up the Dee towards Chester andCrewe, partly attributable to land/water temperature differences:
but of course one can detect neither SST nor land temperature
through clouds. By contrast, we are in the Snowdonia rain shadow.
Wales averages 1,444 mm of rain per year. In the last six years,
my weather station has reported an average rainfall of 890 mm
a year—just less than two thirds of the Welsh average. But I live
about 35 miles from Snowdonia, which has, over the past 30 years,
averaged 4,473 mm, over three times the Welsh average. Moist
south-westerly air is forced up over the mountains where it deposits
its moisture as rain, thus drying the air that arrives at my weather
station. The impact of the mountains on my local rainfall cansometimes be seen on the rain radar but I have yet to find any wayof spotting it directly on the satellite imagery.
My third analytical mode derives from the question: ‘Can I really
understand what the weather is doing?’ This is me trying to get abetter grip on how weather develops and how to identify frontal
systems: upper troughs (tricky), wind shear and rainfall, both toimprove my knowledge of meteorology and to enable me to pit mywits against the forecasters. This latter may seem silly, when you
think of the numerical data Met Offices have available—the weathermodels they use and the massive computer power they deploy—but
the real objective is for me to learn. At the local or regional scale
one can sometimes beat the experts—but not often. By ‘weather’ I
mean, by the way, North Atlantic and UK weather; I never go intomuch detail outside my own corner of the globe.
In this mode I am likely to be using multiple ‘Jobs’ in GeoSatSignal,
including those relating to water vapour images (which are usefulfor identifying frontal areas), and one of the ‘Precipitation CLUTS’
to spot potential rainfall. GRIBViewer is used to see cloud types
and heights, while Rob Alblas’ xrit2pc is invaluable in showing
how the air masses are moving. Fred van den Bosch’s handy little
program for animating the MSLP and 500 mb pressure charts fromGRIBViewer may also be utilised. Unfortunately, these GRIB data
come without a scale, so one can only say: ‘This is low pressure
and it’s forecast to develop in this way’ (but that is quite usefulwhen combined with other information). The IR animation for the
North Atlantic is, again, essential for me in this mode of operation.
This intensity of use of the EUMETCast data is likely to takeover a large part of a day or evening. There may be books onsatellite imagery and meteorology on the desk and floor while the
EUMeTrain ePort page at
http://www.eumetrain.org/eport.html

will at some time be open on one of my screens ( The ‘Europe’
option covers the North Atlantic and the whole of Europe). The
ePort page is particularly useful for Thermal Front Parameters andupper level winds on the synoptic scale. The ePort analysis uses
much the same data as I have, but is clearly using algorithms towhich I do not have access. As these ePort analyses are only a
few hours adrift of real time, I also find it helpful to see how theirinterpretations compare with mine—which is just a way of sayingthat I get my homework marked by the experts.

Rob Denton - g4yrz@wxsat.org
At home I make use of a number of rechargeable 12-volt lead-acidstorage batteries (accumulators), rather like those used in motorcars. My weather station PCs, for instance, are backed up by a
3 kilowatt uninterruptable power supply (UPS) which uses eight
12 V, 7.5 Ah sealed glass ‘mat’ batteries. At around £130 a set
these don’t come cheap, and mine were clearly reaching the endof their life as their backup time was down to 10 minutes after the
power went off. I would normally expect much more than that.
It wasn’t that my batteries had packed up; it was simply the fact thatthe lead plates inside them had become covered in non-conducting
lead sulphate, thus rendering them unable to perform correctly.
Most people replace theirbatteries at this stage but
you know what? They
simply needed desulfating.
I use the Infinitum
desulfator, which seems anice choice at a good price.
As times get harder wetighten our purses more—
so why did I suddenly
splash out on a £30 battery
desulfator? I’ll tell you why: this little box of tricks has already saved
me over £180.
The desulfator works just great on car and truck batteries. You cansimply leave it permanently connected on your car to keep thebattery in tip-top condition. One thing that I must mention is thatthe desulfator is not a battery charger: it merely reconditions yourbatteries. It will not work with damaged cells. It requires a constant
power supply to work and I use a small motorcycle battery charger
in conjunction with my desulfator.
I am very pleased with my desulfator and can confirm it has saved
me a lot of money for a small outlay.
Reference
Infinitum desulfators can be purchased fromwww.geo-web.org.uk

http://www.infinitumstore.com

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Observation
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2012
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A NASA Earth Observatory Report

When viewed from the International Space
Station, the night sky is illuminated bylight from many sources. For example,
the Midwestern United States presents
a nighttime appearance not unlike apatchwork quilt when viewed from orbit.
In the image above, the artificial lightfrom human settlements appears with acharacteristic yellow tinge: the green lightof the aurora borealis also shines brightly
in this view—even seeming to reflect off
Earth’s surface in Canada. A small whitepatch of light at top right in the image isalmost certainly lightning from a storm on
the east coast. Part of the ISS appears
across the top of the image.
This astronaut photograph highlights
the Chicago metropolitan area as thelargest cluster of lights, next to the dark

22
22

patch of Lake Michigan. The other largest
metropolitan areas include St. Louis,
Minneapolis–St. Paul, and the Omaha–Council Bluffs region on the Nebraska–Iowa
border. The northeastern seaboard lies justbeyond the Appalachian Mountains, a dark
winding zone without major cities.
City light clusters give an immediate senseof relative city size. Demographers haveused nighttime satellite imagery to makeestimates of city populations, especially inthe developing world, where growth can be
rapid.
The sense of scale changes significantly in
oblique views. Des Moines is 200 km from
Omaha and 375 km from Minneapolis, yet
the distances appear roughly the same inthis view.

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www.geo-web.org.uk

In contrast to the regular township pattern,interstate highways converge on St. Louis,
Chicago and other large cities, much likewheel spokes around a central hub. Rivers,
major visual features by day, become
almost invisible at night. The course of
the Mississippi appears as a slightly
meandering zone from Minneapolis throughSt. Louis and continuing out of the lower
right corner.

Astronaut photograph ISS029-E-12564
was acquired by the Expedition 29 crew
on September 29, 2011, using a Nikon
D3S digital camera with a 20 mm lens,
and was provided by the ISS Crew Earth
Observations experiment and Image
Science & Analysis Laboratory, Johnson
Space Center.

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John Tellick
The last days of 2011 featured two tropical storms—Cyclone Thane,already well developed, and Benilde, which began as a category‑4
Tropical Storm No 4 and was later upgraded to Cyclone Benilde.
Both these cyclones were in the Indian Ocean, Thane in thenorthern Indian Ocean/Bay of Bengal and Benilde, ‘harmlessly’ inthe southern Indian Ocean.
Category‑1 Cyclone Thane (figure 1) tracked west from the Bayof Bengal making landfall close to Puducherry on December 30.
Thane reportedly brought torrential rain and gale force winds of up
to 145 kph which uprooted hundreds of trees, and knocked down
electricity poles and mobile phone towers, leading to power andcommunications outages in several areas. Roads in the region wereclosed by uprooted trees and train services were disrupted.
There was an associated storm surge of 1.5 metres which flooded
low lying coastal areas causing extensive damage to hundredsof hectares of standing paddy crops in the coastal districts of
Cuddalore, Villupuram, Nagapattinam and Thanjavur. There wasalso extensive damage to small fishing boats. Despite the storm
warnings in force (with twenty thousands people using relief
shelters), there were fatalities, 39 in Cuddalore, south of Chennai
and a further seven in Puducherry. Some people who refused
to go to relief centres and remained in low lying villages foundthemselves marooned.
A recent study has linked increasing air pollution over the Indian
sub-continent to an increase in the intensity of Tropical cyclones off
its shores. In a warming climate, most prediction models suggestthat tropical cyclones will increase in intensity although theirfrequency is unlikely to change. That means stronger winds andmore rain causing greater flash flooding and storm surges.

Figure 1 - Cyclone Thane makes landfall on December 30, 2011 (Metop-A).

Two nuclear power plants are situated on the Kalpakkam coast and,while both employed operating procedures for cyclone emergency
conditions, neither stopped running and emerged from the storm
safe and undamaged.
There is a detailed report on Cyclone Thane’s development in Wikipedia.

Figure 1 - TS ‘Four’ developed into category‑1 cyclone Benilde, exhibiting the classic ‘hole in the middle’ on December 31, 2011 (Metop A)

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Les Hamilton
Following a relatively mild start to 2012, winterstruck Europe with a vengeance during thefinal week of January. As high pressure from
Siberia spread rapidly westwards, the continent
suffered some of its lowest temperatures for
decades. Many countries, swept by blizzards
and gripped by severe cold, had to battle toclear snow from roads and railways. By the firstweekend of February, over two hundred had
perished from the cold while many more were
suffering from hypothermia and frostbite.
Almost half of the fatalities occurred in
Ukraine, most of them homeless people,
some of whom were found simply lying deadon the streets: others died in their homes.
Many hundreds more were hospitalised,suffering from hypothermia and frostbite. Withovernight temperatures falling as low as ‑33°C,
the authorities deployed over 1700 heating
shelters across the land, predominantly for thehomeless, and provided them with hot drinks,
boiled potatoes and pork fat (a traditional
Ukrainian dish). Hospitals were instructed not
to discharge homeless patients to protect themfrom the cold. In the capital, Kiev, schools andcolleges were closed while supermarkets werereporting food shortages because delivery
trucks were struggling to access them indaytime temperatures as low as minus 25°C.
Hundreds of small towns and villages insouthern Romania were left without electricity
after strong winds toppled trees and brought
down power lines. Police, ambulance crews
and the army were all drafted in to rescue
hundreds of motorists stuck in their carsfollowing persistent blizzards. Up to a metre ofsnow fell in just 24 hours, derailing a train andforcing authorities to ban traffic from Romania’s
two motorways until the weather improved.
In some places, the temperature plunged to-32.5°C and several deaths were recorded, withseveral hundred victims, many homeless, taken
to hospitals or rescue centres suffering fromhypothermia. Eighty percent of the Danube
river was frozen over, preventing shipping
accessing the Black Sea. Parts of the sea alsofroze near the Romanian coastline, and someof the country’s ports, including the largest,
Constanta, were closed in the face of strong
winds and driving snow.
Several towns and cities in Bulgaria
experienced record low temperatures, with-29.4°C reported in Kneja and ‑31.4°C in
Sevlievo. Over 1000 schools were closed
across the country, much of which was underan ‘orange alert’, warning of dangerously low
temperatures after sixteen towns recorded
their lowest temperatures since records beganover a century ago. There were about a dozen
deaths due to the cold, and in Sofia, it wasso cold that cash machines were freezing up.
Parts of the River Danube froze over.
The first week of the freeze caused 40 deathsin Poland where the temperatures plunged to-35°C in some areas.

In Russia, temperatures fell to -21°C in
Moscow but only one person was reported tohave died of the cold. But the low temperatures

across Eastern Europe prompted Russian
gas provider Gazprom to warn over supplies
to Europe. The Russian gas export monopoly
provides a quarter of Europe’s gas markets,
but was now receiving more requests for export
than it could physically accommodate as homedemand in Russia rose.
Heavy snow caused disruption across Europe,
carpeting much of Italy, where there was trafficchaos in Bologna, Milan. Rome experienced
only its second day of snow in fifteen years as
5 cm of white flakes covered palm trees andancient ruins across the city. In Venice, canals
started freezing over in a temperature of -5°C.
In central Italy, heavy goods lorries were barredfrom motorways, rail services were reduced
and several Serie‑A football matches werecalled off because of the wintry conditions.
Temperatures also plunged in France where
southern areas were hard hit by snow and ice
as the temperature fell seven degrees below
the seasonal norm. In Corsica, at least 20 cm ofsnow covered the centre of the Mediterranean
island and most mountain passes were closed.
Power cuts hit some 60,000 homes on theisland and the neighbouring French mainland.
In Bosnia, two helicopters were used to supply
remote villages in the north of the country withfood and medicine after almost 300 people
were cut off in temperatures of -10°C. Some ofthese villages had no electricity for several days
and crews were working around-the-clock trying
to repair power lines. Helicopters were also
deployed in neighbouring Serbia to evacuate
dozens from snow-blocked villages. They also
uplifted nine people who attended a funeral but
could not return home over icy, snow-chokedroads. Further teams of workers ploughed
through snowdrifts to take supplies and aid tothousands of residents in mountain villages cut
off by the weather. The situation was dramatic,with snow up to five metres deep in some areas
and only the rooftops of buildings visible.
In Slovakia, two people died in temperaturesof -24°C and in neighbouring Czech Republic,
a 47 year old homeless man was found frozen
to death in the eastern city of Karvina. The
Republic also claimed the doubtful distinctionof recording Europe’s lowest overnighttemperature: -38.1°C.
In Slovenia, winds of up to 180 kph blew off
roofs and prompted authorities to close someschools. And as temperatures plunged in
Albania, the state ombudsman temporarily
re-homed fifteen families in his Tirana office.
In Hungary, numerous schools suspended
classes, including one that claimed it could notafford the high heating bills.
In Macedonia, a fishery had to use pneumatic
drills to break ice and get to the fish. And
local hunters were using tractors to take foodto animals in the mountains of southwestern
Satornja, where roe deer and other small
game animals were on the verge of starvation
because they could not feed for the deep snow.
Soon after the first snow fell in Belgium, there
were over 1100 kilometres of traffic jams on

www.geo-web.org.uk

roads and highways, smashing the previous‘record’ of 948 km in February 2010.
In the Netherlands, icebreakers were deployed
to clear access to Rotterdam harbour, but the
optimistic Dutch were eyeing the conditions with
anticipation, hoping that the Friesland canals
would become sufficiently frozen to allow theclassic Elfstedentocht 200 km race to be held
for the first time since 1997 (see GEOQ 22,
page 16).

The GEO Reportcontinued from page 3

one of our members, Peter Burden, has
personal knowledge of this river: he once
spent three days actually camping in thearea, so I guess no research was necessary
on his part.
Another member, Anders Hook reported
that the Swedish version of Wikipedia wasmore informative than the English version.
I didn’t know there was any difference but
apparently there is.
CD of Darmstadt Visit
This is a reminder that a CD containing
the day’s presentations during GEO’s
visit to EUMETSAT is still available. The
EUMETSAT staff devoted considerable
time and effort into preparing this material
specially for our visit, and then compilingthem all onto a CD. I still have a number ofcopies of this CD left, and if any member
wants one they should contact myself. UK
members should write to me and enclose
six postage stamps.
Members in Europe or Rest of World cansend an email request to me, supplying
their full postal address. Note the stamps
cover the cost of distribution, the disc is freeof charge.
The disc is full of informative and technicaldata and the presentations, which are inPowerPoint format are:
• MSG-Meteosat - By Marianne Koening• EUMETCast Evolution - By KlausPeter Renner• METOP/ EPS - 5 Years in Orbit - By
Dieter Klaes• Meteosat Third Generation (MTG)
Presentation - By Peter Albert• The New NOAA Polar Sysyem
Including NNP - By Francois
Montagner• Overview of Satellites and EUMETSAT- By Sally Wannop• UNS Enhancements - By Sally
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Figure 1 - Sich-2 as it might appear from orbit

Les Hamilton

Image: State Space Agency of Ukraine (SSAU)
www.nkau.gov.ua

Just seven days prior to the 20th anniversary of the nation’s
independence, Ukraine successfully launched its fifth satellite,
Sich-2, into Earth orbit. The launch, aboard an ISC Kosmotras
Dnepr carrier rocket, took place from the Yasny launch base in the
Orenburg Region of Russia on August 17, 2011. The new satellite,
which ultimately cost $30 million to develop and launch, will provide
accurate data to help monitor disaster situations and check on thegrowth of crops across the nation.
None of the previous four Ukraine-operated satellites remains
operational but Sich-2 sent its first test images of Earth fromorbit within days of its launch and is expected to become fully
operational by the end of this year. Sich-2 carries both opticaland infrared imagers, as well as Potential, a complex of scientificinstrumentation which will study space plasma particles and electricand magnetic fields in the upper atmosphere. Potential includes:• DN Probe, to study neutral particles of space plasma• DE Probe to study charged particles of space plasma• EZ Probe, the satellite’s hull potential indicator relating toplasma• ODHD, the on board data collection and handling system

Figure 2 - Sich-2 launch
Image: SSAU
www.nkau.gov.ua

137.40 MHz. But Sich-2 is a very different craft: its optical scanneris capable of resolving details on Earth’s surface with a resolutionof 8 metres and will transmit its images digitally to ground stations.
Although this resolution is considerably lower than that of highend remote sensing satellites such as Ikonos (1 m greyscale,
3 m colour), GeoEye-1 (0.4 m/1.65 m) and OrbView-3 (1 m/4 m),
Sich-2’s images and data will nonetheless prove highly usefulfor applications such as cartography, environmental and disastermonitoring, and agricultural and real-estate planning. But Sich-2
has no APT: it transmits it’s data in the S-band (between 2 GHz and
4 GHz). Figures 6 to 8, three of theearly test images, illustrate theresolving power of Sich-2.

Also, for the accomplishment of experimental tasks on themeasurement of Earth’s magnetic field, a LEMI-016M high-precision
lux-gate magnetometer is installed on the satellite.
History
Sich-2 is the third Ukrainian spacecraft in the series named ‘Sich’,
which means ‘Owl’. The first, Sich-1, which was based on thedesign of the former Soviet Union’s Okean-O1 remote sensing
satellite, was placed into orbit by a Tsyklon-3 carrier rocket inAugust 1995, the first Ukrainian satellite to be launched following
the nation’s independence. The payload also included six othersatellites: RASAT (Turkey), NigeriaSat-2 and NigeriaSat-X (Nigeria),
EduSat (Italy), AprizeSat-5 and AprizeSat-6 (USA).
The second Sich satellite, Sich-1M, was also based on Okean-O1,
and was launched by a Tsyklon-3 on December 24, 2004.
Unfortunately, the orbit circularisation burn of the upper stage of thecarrier rocket shut down prematurely, leaving the spacecraft in alower-than-planned orbit. Although Sich-1M was able to operate fora short period, interaction with Earth’s upper atmosphere caused its
orbit to decay rapidly, and the satellite burned up on April 15, 2006,
less than sixteen months into what had been planned to be a threeyear mission.

Figure 3 - The Sich-2 satellite was designed to carry downward-pointing
optical (left) and infrared (right) sensors to photograph the Earthsurface. A communications system can be seen in the center.
Copyright © 2011 Anatoly Zak

The Sich-2 satellite was designed to enable low-cost observation ofEarth’s surface from space, replacing the larger spacecraft of theSoviet era. The project began in the 1990s but financial problems
kept it on the ground during the first decade of the 21st century. The
new-generation Sich-2 spacecraft was derived from the Egyptsat-1
satellite, developed in Dnepropetrovsk by KB Yuzhnoe for the
Egyptian government, and launched in 2007.

Sich-2 is a small Earth Remote Sensing satellite based on
Yuzhnoye’s MS-2-8 micro satellite platform and built under
Ukraine’s National Space Program. Designed using a wide range ofpolymeric and composite materials, Sich-2 really is a tiny spacecraft(figure 4), with a nominal mass of just 170 kg: but it punches well
above its weight. Its forerunner Sich-1, by contrast, weighed awhopping 1.95 tonnes while Sich-1M was even more massiveat 2.22 tonnes. The satellite is equipped with an opto-electronic
scanner with one panchromatic and three spectral bands, a midinfrared scanner and the Potential scientific instrument complex(figure 5). Sich-2 will image along an approximately 46 kilometerwide swath with its optical imager, and a 55 kilometres-wide swath
width with its mid-infrared imager. The spacecraft is stabilised withthe help of special reaction wheels which maintain its position
during orbit and help enable high-precision pointing of its sensors
toward ground targets. Tests carried out on Sich-2 on August 25
indicated that all on board equipment was functioning properly.

Many readers will surely have fond memories of the two earlier
Sich satellites, which transmitted APT visible and radar images on

The Sich-2 project is supported by a ground control complex, an
information development centre and a communications and data

The Satellite

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Figure 7 - This Sich-2 test image was acquired on August 31, 		
2011, and shows bridges crossing the Dnieper riverin Kiev, the state capital of Ukraine.
Image: SSAU

Figure 4 - Sich-2 undergoing configuration and testing
Image: SSAU

Figure 5 - The Potential Scientific Instrumentation

Figure 8 - This Sich-2 image dating from September 13, 2011,shows the diamond mining town of Mirny in eastern
Russia. Prominent near centre is the enormous pit of
the Mir Diamond Mine.

Image: SSAU

Image: SSAU

Figure 6 - This Sich image shows part of the city of Nikopol, on theright bank of the Dnieper river in Ukraine. The patchworkof cultivated fields surrounding the town is clearly visible.
Image: SSAU

Figure 9 - An aerial photograph showing the Mir Diamond Pit
at Mirny, the second largest man-made hole in thesurface of the Earth.

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GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observationtransmission system. An S-Band communication system (2-4 GHz)on board the satellite is responsible for receiving flight control
commands from the ground and transmitting telemetry data to
mission control about the health of all on board systems. A GPS
receiver aboard Sich‑2 provides highly accurate navigational data
about the satellite’s position. The power supply system uses four
solar arrays to generate electricity and store it in an on-board
battery (figure 5).

March 2012

Sich-2 Parameters
Mass
Orbit
Inclination
Stabilisation
Max deviation angle from nadir
Power consumption (max)Power consumption (daily average)
Operational lifespanImaging capability

169 kg668 km
98.074°3-axis
30°
372 W
59 W
5 years
50 000 km2/day

Sich-2 ERS Equipment Specifications
Multispectral Scanner
Panchromatic range
0.51 - 0.90 μm
Multispectral channels

0.51 - 0.59 µm
0.61 - 0.68 µm
0.80 - 0.89 μm

Pixel step projection at nadir~ 8.2 mSwath width at nadir~ 48.8 km
Mid-Infrared ScannerSpectral range
1.51—1.70 μm
Pixel step projection at nadir~ 41.4 m
Swath width at nadir
58.1 km
Data Subsystem
Memory2 GB
Data transmission rate
30.72 Mbps

The Long Road from Conception to Launch
By early 2009, the launch of Sich-2 had been expected to takeplace before the end of that year, but lack of funding forced it tobe rescheduled many times. By the beginning of 2011, with Sich‑2
already delivered to the launch base, the head of the Ukrainian
space agency, NKAU, informed the press that organisational
problems between Ukraine and Russia had forced another launchdelay: to a window between May and early June. The launch
campaign finally commenced in April with a target date of June
20. Delays with the delivery of some of the Dnepr carrier’s sevensecondary payloads—two NigeriaSat cubesats did not arrive till
June 10—caused this to slip till the end of the month.
Figure 10
One of Sich‑2’s first test images, showing the Volkov River exiting
Lake Ilmen and flowing through the Russian city of Novgorod.
Image: SSAU

Imagery
Images currently released demonstrate Sich‑2’s resolving power togood effect. Figure 7 shows the centre of the Ukraine state capital
Kiev, bisected by the Dnieper River. Bridges crossing the river andislands in the stream show prominently. Figure 8 is particularlyinteresting, and was taken when Sich‑2 flew over the town of Mirnyin Eastern Siberia. Of particular note in this image is the enormous
circular hole at lower centre, the Mir Diamond Mine. This open
pit mine is 525 metres deep and 1,200 m in diameter; it is thesecond largest man-made hole in the world (and the 4th deepest)
after Bingham Canyon copper mine in Utah, USA. The airspace
above the mine is closed to helicopter traffic nowadays because
the severe downdraughts that it generates had caused a numberof helicopters to crash after they were sucked into the cavity. The
sheer scale of the endeavour can be judged from the aerial view ofthe pit shown in figure 9, where it completely dwarfs the town itself.
The full page image opposite really shows the satellite’scapabilities. Sich‑2 acquired this detailed image of the San
Francisco Bay and its environs, covering approximately 11 x 16 km,
during an overpass of America on September 18, 2011. The tinyisland in the top left corner of the view is the infamous Alcatraz. At
bottom left can be seen the runways of San Francisco International
Airport while Oakland International Airport stands on the stubby
peninsula at centre right.

At the start of July, the mission slipped yet again, to July 21. Then
new delays pushed it back to July 28, then, almost immediately, toAugust. Finally, the order to fuel the missile was received and, on
August 5, official sources at last declared that the launch would
take place on August 17. The Dnepr rocket finally lifted off ontime, at 07:12:20 UT, from the Yasny missile deployment area andsuccessfully attained orbit. According to NKAU, the Ukrainian space
agency, Sich-2 took its first test images on Aug. 25, 2011,
Application Areas
The Sich-2 Space System is a powerful tool for obtaining instantdata about large areas of land, sea and ocean, as well as
monitoring space weather and geophysical effects in the Earth’s
ionosphere. In Ukraine, these data will be used to benefit mosteconomy sectors: to provide information for public administration,scientific institutions and a wide range of private sector consumers.
The national Sich-2 space system has monitoring applications in
the following major areas:• Agricultural resources.
• Water and land resources.
• Emergency situations.
• Earth’s ionosphere.
Monitoring Agriculture
Space images from Sich-2 will play a crucial role in supporting
effective decision-making in agriculture. They will allow the usageof existing cultivated areas to be assessed by calculating the total
extent of cropped areas, monitoring crop rotation compliance,... continued at the top of page 30

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following the ripening process of grain crops and making
preliminary forecasts as to their probable yields. It will also be used
to detect and predict adverse effects resulting from wind and watererosion and waterlogging. Figure 6 clearly shows a patchwork ofcultivation in the hinterland of the city of Enerhoday on the Dnieper
River.
Monitoring Water and land Resources
Sich-2 data will be valuable in observing the condition of offshore
zones and inland waters, and tracking coastline and river channelchanges. The data will also prove valuable in identifying areas offorest cover: classifying them as deciduous or coniferous, detecting
new cutting areas, fire sites and windthrow as well as studying
environmental conditions that hinder active forest management.
Emergency Monitoring
Space images from Sich-2 will be valuable for monitoring bothnatural and man-made disasters, including floods, snow drifts, fires
and harmful substance emissions. They will be especially helpful
in organising transport for rescuers and their equipment, damage
assessment and monitoring recovery operations.
When identifying an emergency in its initial phase, lower spatial
resolution imagery such as that provided by AVHRR (NOAA) and
MODIS (Terra, Aqua) instruments is most useful. Although Sich‑2
nominally takes visible images measuring just 48.8 x 48.8 km, it
is also capable of taking images in swaths of up to 300 km, so isideal in this context too. However, with its relatively high resolution

March 2012

capability of 8.2 m, Sich-2 will be extremely useful in the laterstages of operational monitoring, when it will assist in identifying
the most critical localities affected by an emergency and help indamage assessment. Sich-2 will also be able to keep track ofongoing situations such as forest fires and coastal pollution.
Monitoring the Ionosphere
The main task of the Potential scientific package installed aboard
Sich-2 is to monitor space weather and record geophysicalinformation about the ionosphere. At altitudes below 800 km, thedynamics of gas particles plays an important role in the behaviourof ionospheric plasma. Direct measurements of such particles werecarried out from satellites in the 1970s and early 1980s but thevolume of information acquired was negligible. Potential will makeuse of new technologies to explore the ionosphere at a brand newlevel and on a long-term basis.
Summary
Flight-design tests of Sich‑2 were completed on October 10 when
all of the spacecraft’s instruments were declared to be functioning
normally.
Although direct reception of data from Sich‑2 will probably never
impinge into the realm of the amateur satellite enthusiast, thisdiminutive satellite shows what can be concentrated into a small
package. Some of the early test images show a stunning degree of
detail, and we can only hope that, once fully commissioned, Sich‑2
imagery will continue to be made available.

Francis Bell
Last December, I received three publications
relating to my interests in Earth observation:
Planet Earth from the Natural Environment
Research Council (NRSC), Image fromEUMETSAT, and ESA Bulletin 148, all as aresult of being on these organisations’ mailinglists. Two of these publishers are alreadyconsidering producing their magazines onlyin electronic form, available via the Internet.
Although I do use the Internet to research
topics, I would be very disappointed if printed
materials ceased to be available. Therefore,
I am specifically encouraging all readers who
might be interested, to apply for inclusion in the
publishers’ mailing lists. This brings a double
benefit: you will receive a personal printed copyof each periodical and attention will be drawn
to the fact that printed materials are still widely
appreciated. Please register, at least, for Planet
Earth, published four times a year and Image,published twice per year: this may help tosecure their future in printed form.
Planet Earth Review
I enjoyed almost all the articles this contained
as most overlapped with my personal interestsin Earth observation. Though containing sometechnical information, the articles were notdifficult to read and, from my own perspective, I
found the following particularly interesting:• The Sun’s activity linked to winter weather• Meteors as a source of the rare metals in theupper Earth’s crust• Atmospheric forensics and ozone depleting
compounds• The risky business of earthquakes• The world’s nitrogen cycle and the balance
between global warming and cooling• The tale of dimethyl sulphoxide and the sulphur
cycle in the oceans

30

I particularly liked the last article, as I haverecently being following Open University
materials relating to ‘Smell of the Sea’chemistry.
The NERC is the UK’s main agency for funding
research training and knowledge exchange inenvironmental science. Their work tackles someof the most urgent and fascinating issues suchas climate change, and natural hazards fromthe deepest oceans to the outer atmosphere.
Research centres include the British Antarctic
Survey, British Geological Survey, Centre for
Ecology and Hydrology, National Oceanography
Centre, National Centre for Atmospheric
Science and National Centre for Earth
Observation.
Contact Information
Planet Earth
To join their mailing list, email your request, giving
your full postal address, to requests@nerc.ac.uk,
or write to Planet Earth Editors, NERC, Polaris
house, North Star Avenue, Swindon SN2 1EU UK.

ESA Bulletin
For a copy, write to Distrimail, Postbus 122, 2370
AC, Roelofarendsveen, The Netherlands and ask to
be put on their mailing list.

EUMETSAT Image
The best option is to visit their web site and enter
your name and address details. Then, in thecomments box, make your request to be put on the
Image mailing list. The URL is
http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/Main/
AboutEUMETSAT/Contact_Us/index.htm?l=en
You can also write to their postal address,
EUMETSAT User Services, Eumetsat-Allee 1,64295 Dermstadt, Germany.

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Les Hamilton
The title of this piece probably comes as a surprise to you. Surely
GEO is not investing in the nuclear fuel industry? Rest assured.
This is not an article about nuclear power: it just happens that
there is a wealth of interesting satellite imagery based around theZaporizhzhya NPP in the Ukrainian city of Energodar.
What triggered my interest in suchan obscure and remote place wasa test image from Ukraine’s new
Earth observation satellite, Sich-2.
Reproduced in figure 5, this false
coloured image with a resolving
power of 8 km/pixel depicts the city ofEnergodar, where the Zaporizhzhya
NPP is located.

Figure 1 - Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant
Image: Wikipedia Creative Commons

Map showing the location ofEnergodar and the Zaporizhzhya
Nuclear Power Plant

Even the most cursory glance at thisimage draws the eye to the large rectangular feature at upper left.
This is the cooling pond associated with the Zaporizhzhya NPP,
whose six massive reactor buildings can be seen lined up at its
northeast corner. My first impression on seeing this was that the cityof Energodar must be quite small: but not so—it has a populationof over fifty thousand. The truth lies in the size of the cooling pond
itself, which is 3.5 kilometres wide. Figure 1 is a view of the station’s
six reactors, viewed from Nikopol, across the Dnieper.
View from Satellites
A few years ago, we reported on a discussion thread from the
GEO-Subscribers forum relating to the nature of a distinctive black
spot that had been observed in high-resolution NOAA infrared
images. The case in question related to the Surgut hydroelectric
plant in central Siberia (GEO Quarterly No 13, page 14).
Given that the Zaporizhzhya NPP is the largest nuclear plant inEurope, it seemed highly likely that it too would leave its mark in
the form of a hot-spot in IR imagery. The water in the cooling pond
recycles through the reactors, as a coolant, so will necessarily be
at a higher temperature than its surroundings. Figure 2, an HRPT
image from a Metop-A late afternoon pass last February, does
indeed reveal a prominent black spot precisely where expected.
Several more such spots indicate the locations of other power
installations.

Figure 2 - Metop-A acquired this channel-3 image of southern Ukraine on
February 16, 2011. A hot-spot on the shore of Kakhovka reservoir reveals
the location of Energodar/Zaporizhzhya nuclear power plant (see map).

Figure 3 was created from the same Metop-A pass using theTemperature tab of David Taylor’s HRPT Reader software. The
warmest feature in the image is the water in the Sea of Azov, which
is just at freezing point (0°C). The northern part of the sea is several
degrees cooler and is clearly covered in ice. Almost everything elsein the image is colder; the Dnieper river and its Kakhovka reservoir
are encased in ice (yellow-green) but the Zaporizhzhya NPP coolingpond (orange dot) is clearly much warmer than its surroundings.
Energodar and its Surroundings
Energodar is one of he youngest and most promising cities in
Ukraine, now the energy capital of the nation. In 1969, all thatexisted here was a 30 kilometre stretch of sandy hills bordering the
Dnieper river, and which was quite unsuitable for agriculture. It washere, on the left bank of the Kakhovka Reservoir, that it was decided
to build the Zaporizhzhya Thermal Power Plant, now the largest of
its type in Ukraine, and on June 12, 1970, the first granite block was
set among the sand dunes at the entrance to the future town. Today
Energodar is one of the most comfortable cities in Ukraine with apopulation of 55 thousand people.

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Figure 3 - The same Metop image, this time rendered using the ‘Temperature’tab in David Taylor’s HRPT Reader software. In this image, deep orange over
the Sea of Azov represents 0°C while the darkest blue represents -33°C.

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GEO Quarterly No 33

Figure 5 - Ukraine’s new Sich-2 satellite took this 8-metre resolution image of Energodar on September 12, 2001, while
undergoing initial testing. The large rectangular cooling pond adjacent to, and west of the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power
Plant is hard to miss. The six nuclear reactor buildings can be seen, in a row, from the northeast corner of the pond.
Image: State Space Agency of Ukraine (SSAU)

In 1978, the decision was taken tobuild the Zaporizhzhya NPP, now thelargest Nuclear Power Station in all
Europe, producing 20% of Ukraine’s
electricity. The first four power units
came into operation between 1984
and 1987, Unit 5 followed in 1989 andUnit 6 was commissioned in 1995. The
plant now outputs 6000 megawatts ofelectrical power and generates 40-42
billion kWh of energy annually.

Figure 6 - In this segment from a 250-metre resolution Terra MODIS image from November 17, 2011, it is justpossible to spot the cooling pond at Energodar.

The 240 kilometre long swelling on
the Dnieper river is the Kakhovka
Reservoir, formed following
construction of the Kakhovka
Hydroelectric Power Station dam
lower down the Dnieper in 1955.
The reservoir took almost three
years to fill and is now one of themost picturesque places of Ukraine.
It boasts an abundance of bream,
carp and other fish, and attracts bothamateur and professional fishers all
year round. The area surrounding
the reservoir has been turned into
the Dneprovsky Porogy State Nature
Reserve and the Veliky Lug National
Park.

Image: MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA/GSFC

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March 2012

Les Hamilton
As you read this, the NPOESS Preparatory Project satellite (NPP)
has been in orbit, undergoing testing, for five months. But, as
is almost de rigeur for these missions, everything has not goneentirely to plan. Checkout of the full suite of instruments wasdelayed after an anomaly occurred in the Visible Infrared Imaging
Radiometer Suite (VIIRS). VIIRS, which observes the Earth at
22 visible and infrared wavelengths, made its first measurements
on November 21, but engineers detected a decrease in sensor
sensitivity in four of its near-infrared and visible channels.
All NPP’s instruments were scheduled to be operationally active by
mid-December, but as a precaution, checkout activities on all fiveof them were put on hold until the VIIRS situation was resolved.
After several weeks of effort, the anomaly was found to be due tothe presence of tungsten oxides on the surface of the mirror, mostprobably originating during the coating process. Checkout resumed
on January 18, and it was anticipated that the commissioning
programme would be completed around the end of February 2012.
NPP Mission Overview
The launch of the Seastar satellite in 1997 marked the beginning ofNASA’s Earth Observing System (EOS). The names of many of thesubsequent EOS satellites will surely resonate with GEO Quarterly
readers: TRMM, Landsat-7, QuikSCAT [1], EOS AM-1 (Terra),
Jason-1, EOS PM-1 (Aqua), ICESat, Aura [2] and other membersof the ‘A-Train’ [3]. These craft have monitored all facets of Earth’s
biosphere: clouds, oceans, vegetation, ice and the atmosphere.
NPP is the first of a new generation of satellites which will extend
and improve these global environmental observations for many
years into the future.
The NPP Science Instruments
NPP carries five Earth monitoring packages, which will, collectively• map land cover• monitor changes in vegetation• measure sea and land surface temperatures• monitor sea ice, land ice and glaciers• track atmospheric ozone and aerosols• monitor natural disasters such as volcanic eruptions, wildfires,
droughts, floods, dust storms and hurricanes
The five instruments in question are the
•
•
•
•
•

Visible/Infrared Imager Radiometer Suite (VIIRS)
Cross-track Infrared Sounder (CrIS)
Clouds and Earth Radiant Energy System (CERES)
Advanced Technology Microwave Sounder (ATMS)
Ozone Mapping and Profiler Suite (OMPS).

With the exception of CERES, these are all new state-of-the-art
instruments. CERES is the same device that currently flies aboard
both Terra and Aqua.
NPP will monitor the health of our planet from space, and thedata acquired will provide an important link between the current
generation of Earth-observing satellites and the missions to follow
in the years ahead.
NPP observes Earth’s entire surface twice daily, once during the
day and again overnight, from an altitude of 824 kilometres, making
its ascending node crossing at 1.30 pm local-time and dumps its

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data to the Svalbard ground station once every orbit. The data arethen be sent to the NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland,
Maryland via fibre optic cable for processing by the Interface
Data Processing Segment. NOAA and NASA then make the data
available through various archive capabilities.
The ATMS is a passive microwave radiometer, which can operate
equally effectively in both clear and cloudy conditions to provide
high spatial resolution microwave measurements of temperatureand moisture. Paired with CrIS, ATMS can produce global sets ofhigh-resolution temperature and moisture profiles used for weather
forecasting and study.
Weighing quarter of a tonne, VIIRS is the largest instrument aboard
NPP and supports 22 spectral channels across the visible andinfrared regions of the spectrum, in the range 0.4 µm to 12 µm. In
many respects, VIIRS is similar to the MODIS device carried by
the Terra and Aqua satellites. The majority of the VIISR channels
have ‘Moderate’ spatial resolution of 0.76 km/pixel at nadir, but
five of them have the superior ‘Imaging’ resolution of 0.38 km/
pixel. Although this might at first give the impression of a poorer
resolution capability than MODIS, where two of the 36 channels
boast a resolution of 0.25 km/pixel, VIIRS provides much improved
cross-track image quality. It is well known that MODIS images
deteriorate badly towards the extremities of the swath: this will bevery much less so in VIIRS imagery.
The front cover of this magazine carries a true colour VIIRS image
showing Florida, acquired by NPP at 17:57 UT on January 25. A
wider greyscaled view appears opposite.
CERES measures both solar energy reflected by the Earth andheat energy radiated from the planet itself, the two key aspectsof Earth’s radiation budget. Some of the sunlight reaching Earthis reflected straight back into space by clouds, snow and ice; theremainder warms land, air and oceans, which later radiate thisenergy back into space. The changing role of clouds in this system
is one of the biggest unknowns in climate science. NPP’s CERES
will continue to extend the record of the quantity of energy enteringand exiting the top of Earth’s atmosphere begun by Terra and
Aqua.
CrIS and the ATMS work in tandem to provide global highresolution profiles of temperature and moisture. These advanced
atmospheric sensors create cross-sections of storms and other
weather conditions, helping with both short-term ‘nowcasting’ andlong-term forecasting. CrIS measures continuous channels in theinfrared region, and has the ability to measure temperature profiles
with accuracy comparable to the Atmospheric Infrared Sounder(AIRS) on Aqua. NOAA will be using CrIS for numerical weather
prediction and, because it is a brand new instrument, its use on
NPP provides a real-world test of the equipment before NOAA’s
upcoming Joint Polar Satellite System (JPSS) missions.
OMPS measures the ozone layer in Earth’s upper atmosphere,
tracking the status of global ozone distributions, including the‘ozone hole’ over the Antarctic. Closer to the ground, OMPS also
monitors harmful ozone in the troposphere to help improve air
quality monitoring. OMPS data combined with cloud predictions
helps to create the Ultraviolet Index, a guide to safe levels ofsunlight exposure.

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The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

NPP - Overview
NPP is a unique satellite, with a design lifetime of five
years, conceived as a bridge between NASA’s current
EOS satellites and the forthcoming series of Joint Polar
Satellite System (JPSS) satellites.
NASA will operate NPP for its first three months inorbit to complete satellite and instrument checkout,
after which the JPSS program will operate NPP fromthe NOAA Satellite Operations Facility in Suitland,
Maryland.
NPP will collect long-term climate data while at thesame time taking those measurements necessary for
day to day weather forecasting. NPP represents a
critical first step in preparing for the next-generation
satellite system, with the following major goals:• To continue and extend the global observations
initiated by the Terra, Aqua, and Aura missions• To provide NOAA and the operational community
with preoperational risk reduction demonstrationand validation for selected JPSS instruments, andalgorithms, as well as ground processing• To provide NOAA with necessary data for
operational weather forecasting until JPSS
becomes operational.
NOAA will provide data from NPP to meteorologists
for weather forecasting, and to climate scientists
to address an array of research questions. Climate
scientists will use the data to enhance theirunderstanding of climate change, meteorologists tomake more accurate live-saving weather forecasts andwarnings, and emergency responders to monitor andreact to natural disasters.
NPP temperature and moisture profiles will be used
as input to weather forecast models to help improve
weather forecast capabilities. NOAA will evaluate theperformance of the new instruments, VIIRS, CrIS,
ATMS, and OMPS, and become familiar with their data
products prior to their becoming the source of NOAA’s
operational data record with the first JPSS satellite.
NPP Renamed
On January 25, 2012, NASA renamed the NPP satellite
as the(Suomi NPP) to honour Verner Suomi, often dubbed‘the father of satellite meteorology.’ Suomi, whoseparents came to the United States from Finland in
1902, spent most of his working life as a meteorologist
at the University of Wisconsin where he made many
scientific and engineering contributions that proved
fundamental in the development of Earth monitoringfrom space. Suomi pioneered remote sensing frompolar-orbiting satellites with Explorer‑7 as early as
1959 and geostationary satellites with ATS-1 in 1966.
Importantly, Suomi invented the ‘spin-scan’ camera
which enabled the GOES series of satellites to makecontinuous images of Earth, leading to the satellite
animations which are now a common feature of TV
weather broadcasts.
Suomi’s interest in satellite meteorology wasn’t confined
to Earth and he was also involved with the early NASAmissions to Venus, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. You
can read more about Verner Suomi’s career at
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Suomi/

References
1 QuikSCAT - GEOQ 9, page 26
2 NASA’s Aura Satellite - GEOQ 7, page 16
3 Full steam ahead for the A-Train - GEOQ 11, page 18

The NPP VIIRS acquired this grayscale image of the USA between 17:57 18:04 UT on January 19, 2012, the first day all 22 channels were active.
Credit: NASA/NOAA

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March 2012

A NASA Earth Observatory Report

The Enhanced Thematic Mapper Plus instrument carried by
the Landsat-7 satellite captured this natural colour image of
Aniakchak National Monument and Preserve on September 15,
2000.
The caldera dominates the view, its southern rim casting a bluegray shadow over nearby snow and ice. A lake lies near thecaldera’s northeastern margin. Vegetation is scarce immediatelyaround the caldera, but slopes are green farther away. The

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Preserve derives its name from this 10 kilometre wide caldera
on the Alaskan Peninsula.
The caldera formed about 3,500 years ago when an explosive
eruption blew away roughly 1,000 metres of overlying mountainand more recent seismic activity has pockmarked the caldera
with cinder cones and lava flows.
This NASA image was created by Jesse Allen and Robert Simmon, using Landsat data
provided by the United States Geological Survey.

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March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Les Hamilton
Last November, Peter Burden emailed me the image below
and commented: ‘I have attached an Envisat (MERIS)
image [1] of the Libyan Desert, centred on 22.6°N, 25.3°E.
MSG confirmed that there was no cloud cover in the region
at that time.’ Peter found the image interesting and wondered
whether GEO Quarterly readers would too. Peter also hopedthat it would be possible to explain some of the detail revealedin his image. I had to agree that it was rather mysterious,

particularly when compared with a (MODIS) image [2] from a
few days earlier from NASA’s Aqua satellite (opposite page).
The Envisat image shows greater detail than the MODIS one,though both have similar ground resolving power (300 m/pixel
for MERIS, 250 m/pixel for MODIS). MERIS also displays amuch wider range in both colour and contrast, and the great
sweeping arcs on the eastern side of its image are barely
discernible on the MODIS version.

Figure 1 - Peter Burden’s spectacular Envisat MERIS image of the Libyan Desert, acquired via the Envi-Ham project at 08.39 UT on November 25, 2011
Image: ESA

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March 2012

Figure 4 - Detail from Cave of the Swimmers
Photo: Paul Ealing/Flickr

Figure 5 - Sand dunes near Jebel Uweinat
Photo: Imolcho/Flickr

Figure 2 - An annotated Aqua-MODIS image from November 19, 2011, showing the Lybian Desert.
Image: MODIS Rapid Response Team at NASA/GSFC

Figure 6 - Wind-sculpted sandstone outcrops
Photo: image: Sejanc/Flickr

Figure 7 - Wind-sculpted sandstone outcrops
Photo: image: Sejanc/Flickr

Figure 3 - The 1934 m high mountain Jebel Uweinat on the border between Libya and Egypt.
Image: NASA ISS image ISS016-E-34241

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Figure 8 - Prehistoric Rock Art near Jebel Uweinat
Photo: Imolcho/FlickrMarch 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

The Libyan Desert

and Wadi Hamra in the northeast. The sandin the centre of the plateau is reddish andWadi Hamra is filled with red sand (‘hamra’is Arabic for ‘red’).

The region shown in figure 1 is the Libyan
Desert, a roughly square, 1.3 million km2
stretch of the eastern Sahara shared
between Libya, Egypt, and Sudan. This is
one of the most arid places on Earth, wheresome locations may experience a total
absence of rainfall for years, even decades,on end. Even in the highlands, rain may
fall as infrequently as once every five toten years. As an example, the mountain
Jebel Uweinat had no rainfall from 1998
until 2006. Temperatures in the Libyan
Desert are very high: indeed, the highest
air temperature ever recorded on Earth,
57.8°C, occurred in the town of Azizya(40 km southwest of Tripoli) in 1922. The
desert as a whole is unremittingly flat withthe exception of elevated massifs around
Libya’s border with Egypt and Sudan andfarther south at Uweinat, where Libya’s
highest mountain, Jebel Uweinat (1934 m)
stands. Otherwise, the desert consistsof gravelly plains, rock outcrops andvast ergs—areas of shifting sand dunes.
Although nomadic herders are known tocross the region, permanent habitation ispossible only at a few scattered oases.
The Great Sand Sea
The light coloured region at top centreof figure 1 is the southern part of the
Libyan Erg, often referred to as the Great
Sand Sea. This part of the Sahara Desert
contains the most massive sand dunes on
Earth: the erg covers an area the size ofFrance and is characterised by dunes up
to 120 metres high. This is the most arid
area in the Sahara with water almost totallyabsent. Long stretches of dunes show up
well, stretching roughly from northeast to
southwest on the image.
The Great Sand Sea smothers the barren
frontiers of Libya and Egypt and supports
no permanent habitation. The parallelridges of sand dunes run for hundreds ofkilometres and travellers through the region
must be exceptionally well prepared: there
is not a single well or water source in its
400 000 km2 extent, conditions that are
extreme even by Saharan standards.
Gilf Kebir
The dark mass occupying much of theupper left-central part of figure 1 is theGilf Kebir (Great Barrier), an 8000 km2
sandstone plateau with a mean elevationof around 300 m but which rises to around1100 metres in the south. It lies in thesouthwest corner of Egypt. Like most of theother sandstone plateaux of the Sahara, its
southern rim rises in sheer cliffs separated
by deep valleys known as wadis.
The northernmost edge of the plateau isdrowning in sand from the Great Sand
Sea and, in the northeast, erosion has
fragmented the cliffs into small islands ofupland. At the extreme north of Gilf Kebirstand the entrances to three large vegetatedvalleys which have been used by tribesmen
for grazing their animals: Wadi Talh on thenorthwest, Wadi Adb el Malik in the centre

The plateau is known for its rugged
beauty, remoteness and the dramatic
cliff paintings (pictographs) and rockcarvings (petroglyphs) which hark backto an earlier era of abundant animal lifeand human habitation. The famed Caveof the Swimmers lies here, in Wadi Sorra(figure 4). Many Neolithic artefacts havebeen discovered in the plateau and thesouthern stretch of Gilf Kebir and its major
eastern valleys house some of the richest
concentrations of Neolithic rock art in theentire Sahara.
Although the plateau’s cap of resistentsandstone has protected it for millennia,
there is stark evidence in the image that it isgradually being broken down. The southernedge of the Great Sand Sea has breached
Gilf Kebir and can clearly be seen eating
deep into the plateau. As the prevailingwinds relentlessly drive the dunes eversouthward, they eventually gain the summitof the uplands before funnelling down theprominent valleys to the south, effectively
cutting the plateau in half.
Jebel Uweinat
Jebel Uweinat (1,934 m) is a mountainous
massif on the Libya-Egypt border. Harshand arid terrain, Uweinat is characterisedby bare rocky plateaux and sandy plains,
although its western slopes do harbour a
few oases supporting grass and bushes
while an important spring, the Ain Dua,
emerges from the foot of the massif on the
Libyan side.
Figure 3 is a photograph of Jebel Uweinat
taken from the International Space Station.
The western side of the massif, whichlies entirely within Libya, is a ring-shaped
granitic complex some 25 km in diameter,
the eroded remains of an ancient dome
intrusion. To the east, the plateau consistsof the more typical Saharan sandstone.
In Neolithic times the region was clearlyheavily populated by both humans and awide variety of animal fauna, as evincedby the plethora of petroglyphs representing
lions, giraffes, ostriches, gazelles, cows andhumans (figure 9).

Figure 9 - Animal petroglyphs
Photo: Imolcho/Flickr

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GEO Quarterly No 33

Yardangs
The lowlands surrounding the Uweinat
plateau typically consist of sand dunes androcky outcrops (figures 5-7), many of thelatter eroded into weird shapes by relentlessabrasion from wind and sand. Indeed, theentire eastern sprawl in figure 1 reveals an
intriguing pattern of parallel lines curving
round the entire upland area from the Great
Sand Sea in the north to Chad’s Tibesti
Massif in the southwest. It is tempting toinfer that this pattern is due simply to drifting
sand, but reference to satellite images over
the years, and to Google Maps, shows it to
be a permanent feature of the terrain.
To understand these features it is necessary
to relate them to the elemental forces atwork in the environment of the Libyan
Desert. As noted already, water is extremely
scarce here, so the main agent of erosionis the wind, which has a powerful tool—sand—at its disposal. Moreover, winds here
tend to be strong and blow primarily fromthe same direction. When laden with sand,these winds erode sedimentary rocks alonglines of weakness in their strata, as well as
removing all surrounding sand down to the
bedrock. If the bedrock itself is not uniformly
hard, the winds will sandblast grooves andhollows out of the softer parts of its surface.
Over time the winds cut away enoughmaterial to leave a sleek-shaped ridge thatruns parallel to the wind, similar in shape tothe bottom of an overturned boat (figure 11).

Figure 10 - A wind-sculpted limestone yardang.
Photo: Banco de Imágenes/Flickr

Such a ridge is known as a yardang.
Depending upon the winds and thecomposition of the rocks from which they
are carved, yardangs may form very
unusual shapes, such as the grotesquepillar of rock in figure 10, carved fromlimestone in the Egyptian quarter of thedesert. Yardangs are generally restricted
to the most arid and sand-poor parts ofdeserts where vegetation and soil areminimal. It has been suggested that therock from which the Great Sphinx in Egypt
was carved may have been a yardang.
Yardangs are most commonly created fromsofter rock types like sandstone, shale andlimestone but have also been observedin banded crystalline rocks such as schist
and gneiss. Extensive areas of low lying
desert areas can be eroded into longparallel ridges which gradually break up into

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separate hills, each eventually assuming
the shape of a yardang. The result is ayardang field. One of the world’s mostextensive yardang fields is found in the
Lut Desert of Iran. Part of it is illustrated
in figure 11 where the typical ‘upturnedboat’ shape of the individual yardangs
is clear. Since yardang ridges always
form parallel to the prevailing winds,
they reveal the wind direction during
their creation. Some of the largest
yardangs in the world are found here,
where individuals may reach tens ofkilometres in length and attain heights
of 60 to 80 metres. This entire system
occupies an area of approximately
150 x 50 kilometres.

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Figure 11 - A field of yardangs in the Lut Desert of Iran
Image: Alexandros.Papadopoulos/Flickr

Mega Yardangs
In many of the world’s desert areas,
yardangs can assume gigantic
proportions. Termed mega-yardangs,
they show up as prominent parallel
striations in satellite imagery of, forexample, the Lut Desert of Iran, theLibyan Desert, the central Sahara, theNamib Desert and even the High Andes.
Figure 12 shows one of the mostspectacular wind erosional features
on Earth, the large concentration ofmega-yardangs situated to the eastof the volcano Emi Koussi in theTibesti Mountains of Chad (at 3445 m
in altitude, Emi Koussi is the highest
mountain in the whole of the Sahara
Desert). The individual yardang ridges
here are up to 20 kilometres long withsome reaching almost 150 metres inheight: the ridges are separated fromeach other by troughs which range
between 500 metres and two kilometreswide.
Mega-yardangs are typically kilometresin length and many tens of metres inheight and tend to be found in arid
regions where the prevailing winds
are particularly strong and persistent,
and always blow from the samequarter. Figure 13, taken by the USGSin Mongolia’s Qaidam Basin, shows
an extensive field of mega-yardangs
stretching all the way to the horizon.

Figure 12 - A Landsat image showing extensive fields of megayardangs east of Emi Koussi in the Tibetsi Massif.
Image: NASA

Conclusion
A comparison between figures 1 and 10
leads to the almost inescapableconclusion that the extensive parallelfeatures in the eastern Libyan Desert
are lines of mega-yardangs.
Reference
Mega-Yardangs: A Global Analysis
by Andrew S Goudie
http://www.uabcs.mx/geologia/
geo_bajamx/geomorfologia/
Goudie_megayardangs_07.pdf

Glossary
1 MERIS - Medium Resolution Imaging
Spectrometer (Envisat)
2 MODIS - Moderate Resolution

Imaging Spectrometer (Aqua)

Figure 13 - Mega-yardangs stretch into the distance in this image taken in in the west-central Qaidam Basin
Photo: Paul Kapp - University of Arizona/USGS

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GEO Quarterly No 33

Don Weston
In mid 2011, I decided to resurrect myinterest in receiving APT images andpurchased from Germany a Wrasse
WeSaCom APT-06 receiver. To my surprise,after re-erecting my original turnstile
antenna—dating from the late 1980s—
my first images started out better than
expected. However, after a week or two, theimages started to deteriorate so I started
building a QHA antenna to see if that solved
the problem.

‘hash’ points. In due course I decided
to make use or the AD feature of the
APT-06AD, and finally, in early December,connected the receiver up to my two aerials,
mounted about four metres apart. The
improvement proved astounding.

Clean imagery was now being received
from a 0° horizon in the south to about 7.5°in the north, where most passes cut out
cleanly behind a hill. If that hill were notthere I would be able to get the maximum
15 minutes reception, but 13 -14 minutes

From the start, the QHA had the edge
on the old turnstile at very low passelevations but I was never able to match
those first images. Initially I suspected badconnections, but it soon become apparent
that the receiver was slowly failing and was‘all over the place’: I was receiving only a
few minutes on good passes and the IR
channel was virtually useless as the whites
were either covered in ‘hash’ or were overmodulated. No adjustments of any sort wereable to cure the problem.

The Wrasse WeSaCom APT-06 Receiver

I contacted the manufacturers with sample
imagery, clearly showing the problem,
and without hesitation a replacement
was forwarded. This turned out to be thesuperior APT-06AD model, with the added
antenna diversity (AD) feature, a very
generous gesture on their part.
When I originally ordered the APT-06, I
had considered purchasing the AD model
but, on past experience, did not see whatjustification there was having two aerials.
Reception with the replacement receiver
proved more constant and more sensitive.
I was now receiving clear imagery down
to 70°S and beyond, but still suffered fromunknown ‘hash’ points where the signal
deteriorated. Each aerial had its own unique

The author’s roof with, QHA, Davis radio weather
wtation (solar powered) and turnstile.

This NOAA 18 image comes from the 16:41 NZST pass on December 2, 2011www.geo-web.org.uk

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GEO Quarterly No 33

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is obtainable. I’ve learned that the easiest way to get into AD mode is to switch
the power to the receiver off then back on: while the five red LED’s are blinking
press the => button and the green LED starts blinking, indicating AD mode.
Switching the power back on without pressing the => button defaults the system
to single antenna mode (my turnstile).
What has amazed is how quickly the northbound passes start giving clean
unadulterated imagery, usually within about 10 seconds of the signal first being
obtained; reception remains pristine throughout until a clean cut-out at the endof the pass.
Before I started using the AD feature, I could never get more than a few minutesof IR imagery from the early morning and night time passes: now they are much
improved too, just like the later afternoon passes.
While I’m sure I understood how the AD worked, I think there is more to it thanthat. Each aerial on its own never gave a great performance at low elevations,although the QHA did initially have an observable edge over the turnstile. I
would not have thought that taking the best data from each aerial would becapable of coming up with anything like what I’m now getting. Something else is
at work and, while I know nothing about aerial technology, I do know a bit more
about interferometry (as where an array of multiple radio telescopes obtains
higher resolution by combining weak radio signals). This is what I believe may
be happening with my 2-aerial array, and seems to be borne out by the verymuch increased volume coming from my receiver’s internal speaker when apass is coming over.
Another interesting point is that I’ve been able to positively identify local
obstructions that cause signal dropouts at certain compass points and low
elevations. To my surprise, they turned out to be nearby trees. I have two thatare a few degrees above my aerial array at about 50 and 100 feet away. One of
my trees is an evergreen pine so, unless I chop it down or top it, it will always
be an obstacle. The more distant tree stands 180° opposite, across the road,so I can’t do much about that. However, in autumn, it will loose it’s foliage and abettor signal will be able to sneak through it.
As to other obstructions, maybe power poles and power lines, as well as
spurious reflections off roofs and buildings, which I’m sure did account for very
short dropouts. These are now eliminated because the two aerials between
them can never be occulted at the same time—one might say that my aerial
array now has 3D ‘vision’ and can see around thin objects like power poles andTV aerials.
Now, this sort of signal interference is virtually eliminated. I have also been
making some remarkable combination images using Craig Anderson’s WxToImg
software.
http://www.wxtoimg.com/

I like these morning passes, processed in IR with precipitation, as they give mea good indication of the weather that may be coming up for the day ahead. The‘stitching’ together of these images into such seamless montages is somewhat
mind boggling.
At points where I know both aerials get a different signal due to a nearby tree
or low elevation, the AD can be observed switching very rapidly from one
antenna to the other. I have been receiving clean images from satellites thatnever exceeded 5° elevation and were over 3000 kilometres away—and evenmore distant at the extremities of the passes. Of course all this is very mucha game of luck based on ‘reception conditions’, which are never constant as
I realised way back in the late 80s. Looking at my ever growing collection ofpasses poses the question as to why some weren’t better than they were. One
often turns to aerial and connection problems, but for sure, the unpredictabilityof signal reception plays a major role in this game.
The particularly fine image on page 41 was obtained from NOAA 18 at 16:41
NZST on December 2, 2011 with the turnstile aerial alone: it represents almosta full 14 minutes of APT. It starts at 0.7°S and ends cleanly at 7.5°N where thehill occults the signal. To be sure, I had never ever received clear passes of thisduration before and this is now a normal state of reception.
On a final note I see from my wxsat logs of November 25, 1989 that I had arare 12 minute pass recorded, and an average of around ten minutes was asgood as it got in those days. So, without doubt, the ability to receive APT in mycase has certainly improved.

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www.geo-web.org.uk

March 2012

Tutiounecontinued from page 18

You really should use one of the following PCI cards:• TechnoTrend TT S2-3200• Skystar HD ( not HD2)
• KNC One HD• Mystique Satix DVB-S2• Satelco EasyWatch HDTVS2 PCI
which all have an STB0899 demodulator and
SAA7146A interface chip. At present it is not possible
to use any of the USB tuners, such as the Skystar
USB box, with Tutioune. It is hoped, however, thata driver for USB tuners using the same STB0899
demodulator will be developed in the not too distantfuture.
Acknowledgements
My thanks to Jean Pierre Courjaud F6DZP for
helping me to set up Tutioune and extend it toweather satellite reception. Also to Francis Breame
G8ISI, who extended EnviHamBrowse to support
Tutioune. See his website at
http://www.elnath.org.uk/

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Robert Moore
The majority of GEO members pursue their interests on the fringes of a muchwider community of scientists, mathematicians, computer scientists, engineers,
meteorologists and administrators. These latter work at the very highest levels oftechnical expertise, and with considerable ingenuity, to get satellites up, data down
and information out. Our readers have many interests, ranging from making anddeveloping hardware, writing computer programs, or just buying equipment off the
shelf and downloading software written by others. For those of us with an interestin the weather, there are now materials available that were beyond our wildest
imagination twenty years ago. I guess most of us just make do with visualisingwhat we can receive ourselves. But we do not have to stop there, because there aremany resources which enable us to maximise the benefits (and enjoyment) of thedata we receive. Most notable among these is the EUMeTrain ePort website.
As I describe on page 20 of this issue, I do my weather forecasting with theresources I have to hand: EUMETCast satellite imagery, weather charts, and datafrom my own weather station. The barograph trace from the latter is essential tomonitor pressure changes and the passage of fronts. If I leave it at that, I can enjoy
my hobby and produce some pretty good weather forecasts. But the ePort web pageenables me to go further.
At one level this might be seen as‘cheating’, because I am not simply
using the data I receive myself. But thepeople who produce the ePort pages areusing data from Meteosat, Metop and
NOAA satellites—just like me. The maindifference is that they have computerpower available that is second only
to that of the intelligence agencies.
With this they engage in Numerical
Forecasting, a process that demands
vast quantities of data and immense
processing power. Of course, they know
a lot more about meteorology thanmost of us, which means that they canmake much more sophisticated useof the satellite data. I would strongly
recommend you, when you have yourusual array of satellite images onscreen, to visit
http://www.eumetrain.org/eport.html

and select Europe from the ePort
drop-down menu at the top of thepage. This will take you directly to apage displaying a base map of Europe
and the North Atlantic (figure 1) withlabelled check-boxes down both sides.
The set of boxes at top right will be
immediately familiar: ‘Meteosat Second
Generation’. Ticking any of these
options allows you to superimpose an
MSG image or derived product on to
the map: the same visible, IR or watervapour image that you may alreadyhave on your screen, but also ‘Pseudo
IR’ and ‘Pseudo WV’ images derived
from Numerical Forecasting to compare
actual with predicted images.
I normally start with the left handboxes, which are headed ECMWP
NWP [1] . When you tick any check-box,
the relevant chart will be superimposedon the map. This is where you benefit
from the professionals’ computer-powerand expertise, by adding their products
to your own desktop. If you click on thelabel beside any box, a pop-up window
gives a brief explanation of the feature.
I usually start off by superimposing
the MSLP [2] chart over an MSG IR
image, just to confirm the synoptic
view I already have. This chart does notshow fronts, so I click on TFP [3] which
gives an indication of where the fronts
might lie. Fronts are sloping weather
formations, and TFP shows them ataltitude. There is a rather complex plot
available that will enable you to locate
the edge of the front at sea level, but
TFP plus the WV6.2 image will give avery clear general indication of where
the fronts are. Figure 1 shows the TFP
plot superimposed over the 12:00 UT
MSG WV6.2 image for November 25,
2011, after a screenshot had been
imported into Paintshop Pro, and thefronts inserted freehand in red andblue. I can tell which are the warmand cold air masses by ticking the box
for the MSG Air Mass option, which
resulted in the image reproduced infigure 2.
There are many other interestingoverlay features to explore, such as:• Streamlines 300 shows thewind direction at the top of theatmosphere (and thus the jetstream)• T500 gives the temperature a little
below this, so we can begin to
explore activity in the upper air.
Troughs and ridges in the upper
atmosphere can have a profound effecton the weather. From what I have read,
upper level troughs can bring somenasty surprises for weather forecasters,
but they are not always easy to spot.
www.geo-web.org.uk

Half way down the right hand side of
the map is the item NWCSAF. Clicking
the arrow beside it reveals a drop-downmenu with more features that can beplotted over the main map; the first twoitems in the list are Cloud Type (CT),and Cloud Top Temperature and Height(CTTH).
Ticking the SYNOP option brings up
the data for weather stations andplots them across the chart. Initially,
these are far too small to read but, by
selecting the zoom tool at the top left
corner of the chart, you can repeatedly
click on any chosen station to zoom
in and read its data. These data arepresented in the standard format,
familiar to weather observers (figure 3).
The zoomed data for Luqa airport(Malta) at 06:00 UT on the November
29, 2011 (figure 4) shows that thetemperature was 16.4°C and the dew
point 13.2°C. The sea level pressure
was 1021.3 millibars, having risen
0.5 millibars after a downward trend.
The wind speed was between 15 and19 knots on a bearing of about 100°,the sky was 75% obscured by cloud andit was raining. Note: the brown lozengeshaped object on this image is just acrude coastal representation of theislands of Malta and Gozo.
If you tick ‘Soundings’, you bring up
a series of interactive markers on thechart: left clicking on any of theselocations will display a window with aset of four radiosonde charts. I can’t
say I use these charts much because
I’m not very good at interpreting them,but they are just another of the many
features of this very comprehensive
page.
There is a lot more to be discovered in
ePort, and lots to learn, and I would
urge you to try it for yourself. Whatmakes the Europe feature so importantis that it can be used to overlay various
features, including derived data, on thebase map to build up weather images
that are not available in any one of the
programs I have on my computers. And
if you want to pursue this further, try
Africa from the ePort drop-down menu.
The options differ somewhat, but thegeneral idea is the same.
On-line Briefings
From time to time, David Taylor gives
notice of an on-line briefing from
EUMeTrain. Very few GEO members
seem to take part, which is great pity.
These briefings link interested persons

43

GEO Quarterly No 33

The Group for Earth Observation

March 2012

Figure 1 - A, ePort display comprising an MSG WV6.2 image with superimposed TFP plot and hand-drawn fronts added by the author

from weather services and research
institutions, who talk about theweather, view charts and discusspossible interpretations, or discuss
particular themes. Participants may
be spread as far afield as the Azores,
Finland, Turkey and western Europe.
Scotland and Wales are regularly
represented but I have never seen
anyone from England. You can simply
watch and listen, or you can join
in by asking questions and offering
opinions if you wish. These briefings
are recorded and so may be accessed
after the event.
EUMeTrain On-line Courses
EUMeTrain offer on line courses. The
October offering was Ocean and Sea
Week and, at the end of November,there was LSA-SAF Week whichgave an in-depth view of these data,
their limitations, how they are used
and future plans for development
and dissemination. The LSA_SAF
data are variables derived throughoften complex computations, and it
was especially interesting to learn
from these lectures how they are
constructed and validated.
Some very basic issues were discussed
that give pause for thought. For
example, is Land Surface Temperature
what would be read on a thermometerin the back garden; is Sea Surface
Temperature the reading obtained on athermometer lowered over the side ofa boat?

44

No they are not. The sun shines on
Earth and satellites measure its
radiation reflected back from theground, sea and clouds as well as thatradiated from the atmosphere. So weneed to be very clear about what we
see in our imagery—the images we use
are simply electromagnetic energy ofsolar origin reflected or radiated from
Earth. The implications of this may be
explored further by viewing some of
the November lectures recorded andavailable on the EUMeTrain web site.

Figure 2 - An example of the MSG Airmass option

The EUMeTrain home page contains‘Showcase’ examples demonstrating
how images may be interpreted.
The page also has links to thetraining materials and lectures, andto the Manual of Synoptic Satellite
Meteorology.
I’m sure that many readers are
missing out on good things if they
are not accessing this site, which is
supported by EUMETSAT. Anyone who
would like to expand their horizons
gently could start by looking at
Today’s Images to get a taste of what
is waiting and freely on offer for them.

Figure 3 - The station weather symbol code

Glossary
1 European Centre for Medium-Range
Weather Forecasts Numerical Weather
Prediction
2 Mean Sea Level Pressure
3 Thermal Front Parameter

www.geo-web.org.uk

Figure 4 - Station data for Malta

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

GEO Quarterly No 33

Peter Burden

Envisat MERIS image courtesy ESA

Peter Burden is always on the look-out for interesting weatherfeatures in the Envisat MERIS images he acquires throughthe Envi-Ham project. The image above, looking down on thesouthern half of the UK and northern France on December 26,
2011, is a case in point.
Peter relates: ‘It was interesting to observe that, with thesouthwesterly wind, the clouds were formed as they reached
Ireland. These lee wave clouds are produced by orthographic
lifting of air which, after passing over a mountain, oscillates

The noon weather chart showing the approaching front andthe southwesterly airstream over Ireland and England.

up and down as it advects. If the air lifts upward and cools
through expansion as it rises to its saturation temperatureduring this process, the water vapour within condenses andbecomes visible as cloud.
In the image above, the leading western edge of a front isapproaching County Kerry, a mountainous area of Ireland.
This is shown in the forecast chart at lower left. Additionally,
to clarify the geography, I have produced the image at lower
right, where a green underlay indicates the land features.

The same MERIS image with an underlay to show the land areas.

www.geo-web.org.uk

45

GEO Quarterly No 33

EUMETCast On-Line
Registration Guide
If you require to register as a first-time user for
any of the free EUMETCast data streams suchas MSG, NOAA AVHRR, Metop etc., or needto renew an existing subscription, this must be
done on-line.
GEO has produced a step-by-step guide to theentire process at
http://www.geo-web.org.uk/eumreg.html
This guide also contains a direct link to theofficial EUMETCast on-line registration form,
which can otherwise prove somewhat tricky tolocate.

GEO Helplines
Douglas Deans

Dunblane, Perthshire, SCOTLAND.

All aspects of weather satellites from APT,
HRPT to Meteosat-9 DVB/EUMETCast
systems.
• telephone:(01786) 82 28 28• e-mail: dsdeans@tiscali.co.uk
John Tellick
Surbiton, Surrey, ENGLAND.
Meteosat-9 advice: registering for the various
MSG services, hardware and software
installation and troubleshooting. John will
also field general queries about any aspect ofreceiving weather satellite transmissions.
• telephone: (0208) 390 3315
• e-mail: info@geo-web.org.uk
Geoff Morris GW3ATZ
Shotton, Flintshire, NE WALES.
Geoff has lots of experience with aerial,coax,connectors, mounting hardware etc. andhas also done a lot of work with the orbiting
satellites. Geoff has been a EUMETCast
Meteosat-9 user for some time and is familiar
with David Taylor’s MSG software. He
should be able to share his experiences with
newcomers to this branch of the hobby.
• Tel: (01244) 818252• e-mail: gw3atz@btopenworld.com
Mike Stevens
Portland, Dorset, England.
Advice offered on EUMETCast (MSG andMetop) and APT.
• email: mike1g4cfz@msn.com
Guy Martin G8NFU
Biggin Hill NW 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
San Juan, 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 made at any
time, but we would ask you to respect privacy
by restricting telephone contact to the period
7.00-9.00 pm in the evenings.

46

The Group for Earth Observation

Weather Satellite Reports
If there is a single Internet Forum that isrelevant to all weather satellite enthusiasts,
it must surely be Douglas Deans’ Weather
Satellite reports.
Here you will find every conceivable type of
information about weather satellites, whether
polar or geostationary, APT, HRPT, LRIT orwhatever.
Absolutely everything is covered, and theinformation is updated every week. Special
additional bulletins may be issued if an
important change takes place mid week.
You can read the bulletins from this URL
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/
weather-satellite-reports/
or, even better, elect to have the reports sent
to you by email every Monday.

Internet Discussion Groups

There are a numerous Internet-based
discussion groups available to weather
satellite enthusiasts. You can join any ofthese by sending an e-mail to the appropriate
address, with a request to subscribe. Indeed,a blank e-mail containing the word ‘subscribe’in its Subject line is all that is required. Someof the more useful groups and their contact
addresses are listed below.
APT Decoder
This is a group where users of Patrik Tast’s
APTDecoder can share information andproblems.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/
group/APTDecoder/
GEO-Subscribers
This is GEO’s own group, where members
can exchange information and post queries
relating to any aspect related to weather
satellite reception (hardware, software,antennas etc), Earth observation satellites andany GEO-related matter.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/
group/GEO-Subscribers/
Satsignal
An end-user self help group for users ofDavid Taylor’s Satellite Software Tools(SatSignal, WXtrack, GeoSatSignal, HRPT
Reader, GroundMap, MSG Data Manager,
AVHRR?Manager and the ATOVS?Reader).
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/
group/SatSignal/
MSG-1
A forum dedicated to Meteosat Second
Generation (MSG), where members share
information about the EUMETCast reception
hardware and software.
http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/
group/MSG-1/

www.geo-web.org.uk

March 2012

Copy Deadline for
GEO Quarterly No 34 is
Sunday, April 29, 2012
The Editor is always delighted to receive
articles and images for inclusion in
GEO Quarterly. These can relate to any
aspect of Earth Imaging, especially• Technical articles concerning relevant
hardware and software• Construction projects• Weather satellite images• Reports on weather phenomena• Descriptions of readers’ satellite imaging
stations• Activities from overseas readers• Letters to the Editor• Problems and Queries for our experts toanswerContributions should of course be original
and, where possible, should be submitted
to the editor in electronic format (e-mailattachment, CD, DVD). But of course, wewould also accept handwritten or typed copy.
Please note, however, that major articles
which contain large numbers of satellite
images, photographs or other illustrations
should be submitted as early as possible,
so that they can be prepared and made up
into pages in time for publication.
Images and Diagrams
Images can be accepted in any of the major
bitmap formats: JPG, BMP, GIF, TIFF etc.
Images in both monochrome and colour are
welcomed. Line drawings and diagrams are
preferred in WMF, EPS or postscript formats.
We can also scan original photographs,
negatives and slides.
Gridding, Overlays and Captions
Please note that readers’ satellite images
should be provided without added grid lines,
country outlines or captions unless these areconsidered essential for illustrative purposes
within an article.
If your article submission contains embedded
images and diagrams, please note that you
must also submit copies of the original
images in one of the formats describedabove: these are essential for page make-up
purposes.
Submission of Copy
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 by email
attachments to the following address
geoeditor@geo-web.org.uk
Particularly large attachments (8 MB andabove) can be transmitted via YouSendIt
www.yousendit.com_________________________
And finally . . .
if you do have material ready for the next
issue of GEO Quarterly, please submit it
as soon as it is ready—do not wait till thedeadline above: this will simply create an
editorial log-jam and delay publication.

March 2012

The Group for Earth Observation

www.geo-web.org.uk

GEO Quarterly No 33

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GEO Quarterly No 33

48

The Group for Earth Observation

www.geo-web.org.uk

March 2012