10.4. Using Geo2Grid to Create Animations¶
The advantage of Geostationary Satellites is the temporal resolution of the observations. Geo2Grid offers an easy interface for creating animations from Geo2Grid GeoTIFF and PNG files. The following example demonstrates how Geo2Grid software can be used to create an animation of files from a latitude/longitude subset of GOES-16 ABI CONUS GeoTIFF images located over the Southeastern United States.
Create a series of GOES-16 ABI GeoTIFF files from a time sequence of data. In the bash shell script example below, I use the ABI CONUS Band 1 files to search for all files we have available from 4 January 2019. The files for this day are all located in the same directory. I then create true and natural color images from all time periods that are available.
#!/bin/bash
# Set GEO2GRID environment variables
export GEO2GRID_HOME=/home/g2g/geo2grid_v_1_2
export PATH=$PATH:$GEO2GRID_HOME/bin
# Get input list of files/times based upon ABI Band 1 files
ls -1 /data/abi16/20190104/OR_ABI-L1b-RadC-M3C01_G16_s2019004*.nc > file_list.txt
sort_list=$(cat file_list.txt | sort)
# Make images for each time period available
for file in ${sort_list} ; do
echo ${file}
# get date/time for geo2grid file search
datetime=`basename $file | cut -c27-38`
echo "datetime :"$datetime
# Cut out a box with lat/lon bounds of 23N, 105W to 37N 75W
geo2grid.sh -r abi_l1b -w geotiff --ll-bbox -105 23 -75 37 --num-workers 8 -p true_color natural_color -f /data/abi16/20190104/*${datetime}*.nc
done
exit 0
This script created 120 GeoTIFF images for my time period 10:00 UTC through 20:00 UTC, with a time step of every 5 minutes.
To create a 120 image animation, I use the Geo2Grid utility script
gtiff2mp4.sh
.
gtiff2mp4.sh my_true_color_animation.mp4 *true_color*.tif
The script wraps the ffmpeg
video software, and combines all of the
*true_color*.tif
files found in the directory into an animation
based upon defaults that make the output animations most compatible
with modern video players. The output frame rate is 24 frames per
second. The images will automatically be resized if they are
large in order to ensure a smooth animation. I chose an output
filename of my_true_color_animation.mp4
. The software can also
create animations from input .png
files.
The figure below is the last image in the 120 loop sequence. The output MP4 animation is available for viewing at this site.