92nd American Meteorological Society Annual Meeting (January 22-26, 2012)

Monday, 23 January 2012
GOES Playback and Display: Interacting with Movies
Hall E (New Orleans Convention Center )
James L. Carr, Carr Astronautics, Grennbelt, MD; and M. D. Smith and D. M. Zakar

The GOES-R satellite has three imaging instruments: the Advanced Baseline Imager (ABI), the Geostationary Lightning Mapper (GLM), and the Solar Ultraviolet Imager (SUVI). These instruments provide enhanced imagery with better spatial, spectral, and temporal resolution compared to previous GOES imaging instruments. These new capabilities will be of great use to meteorologists in understanding ground and space weather. In order to monitor the quality of the GRB feed that this information comes in on, GOES-R requires software that can enable the operator to quickly review new imagery in an effective fashion as either movies or still images. GOES-R is not just still photography; GOES-R is movie-making. The subject of this presentation is the Playback and Display component (PAD) of the Product Monitor software (PM) for the GOES-R series, which can support this requirement. We will focus on the image display and interaction capabilities of PAD. Incoming image data from the GOES Re-Broadcast (GRB) is progressively encoded into JPEG-2000 images by the Ingest and Store component (IAS) of the PM. These image files are then quickly made available to PAD – the latency between the full image data being received from the GRB by IAS and being made available to PAD is just a few seconds. The operator, using the PAD GUI, is able to intuitively and flexibly interact with new images as still pictures, or as part of a movie of past imagery. This movie-making capability is a key part of PAD's effectiveness, as it gives temporal context of the imagery to the operator and makes it easier to spot small changes in the imagery. This new capability helps operators ensure the quality of the GRB data to provide GOES users the best possible data for forecast and response.

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