Shouldn't This Be Easy? NOAA Open Source Software For Creating High Quality Satellite Images

Meteorological instruments such as those on the JPSS and GOES satellites pose substantial challenges for providing scientists, forecasters, and the general public with useful high quality images. To make high quality imagery, remote sensing satellite data must be carefully processed and how that is done depends on a couple of key factors. Factors like the type of instrument that observed the data (Imager, Sounder, etc.), what software generated the data files, how the data is stored (HDF4, HDF5, NetCDF, etc.), and what tool will be visualizing or using the data can completely change and complicate how data is processed. To simplify these operations, NOAA has funded the Cooperative Institute for Meteorological Satellite Studies (CIMSS) at the University of Wisconsin to create a pair of open source command line tools called Polar2Grid and Geo2Grid. These easy to install tools provide an interface for converting satellite data file formats to widely used formats and structures required by various visualization tools, including GeoTIFFs, US National Weather Service (NWS) AWIPS compatible NetCDF files, and NinJo forecasting workstation compatible TIFF images. These tools handle all of the complexity involved in this conversion including resampling to custom uniform grids or regions of interest, perceptual enhancements, atmospheric corrections, and RGB, including true color, image creation. While the tools provide simple interfaces, they do not sacrifice performance and can complete the conversions in seconds on large swaths of data. Polar2Grid is currently providing VIIRS imagery over the Continental United States, as well as Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, from various Direct-Broadcast antennas to operational forecasters at the NOAA NWS offices in their AWIPS terminals, within minutes of an overpass of the Suomi NPP and NOAA-20 satellites. The Polar2Grid and Geo2Grid teams are now working hand in hand with the open source PyTroll community as well as communities of other disciplines to provide strong command line tools backed by powerful python libraries. Six years after Polar2Grid development started, the Polar2Grid team is getting ready to release version 3.0 of the software and version 0.1 of the new Geo2Grid software; supporting more sensors, generating more products, and providing all of their features in an easy to use command line interface.