An Innovative System to Generate and Present GOES-16 Images over the Web

The NOAA Center for Satellite Applications and Research was tasked with developing a website to present the GOES-16 image stream for all 16 channels on a near-realtime basis. This was particularly challenging in the case of the Mesoscale image stream from GOES which can be updated as frequently as every minute. The system we developed to meet this requirement is innovative, light-weight, fast-loading, and readily extensible for additional channels and views. Built with McIDAS, Ruby, PHP, HTML, JQuery, CSS, and javascript, the site’s image stream has a latency of less than 10 minutes for full disk and CONUS views and less than 2 minutes for Mesoscale views when the satellite data is accessed via GRB. Site users can access static images, configurable animation loops and downloadable animations of every channel and view from GOES-16. The image stream is described and accessed via reference to a continually updated set of JSON files we call catalogs. These catalogs function as a direct external API to the image stream as well as feeding the web interface. The catalog system allows us to avoid databases and the complete codebase, including scripts to generate images, catalogs, and the web interface total less than 5MB.

The poster we submit will detail the architecture and design of the system with special attention to development process, performance parameters, latency, system resilience, and ease of use.