Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires
arstechnica.com110 points by 01-_- 7 hours ago
110 points by 01-_- 7 hours ago
Do any European space agencies make live weather imagery available at high resolution? I'm looking for a direct link to JPEGs that update regularly, to use with a cron script to use as desktop wallpaper.
I can easily do this for North America using imagery here, for example: https://www.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES/conus.php?sat=G16 (bonus, imagery is Public Domain).
This direct link provides an updated image every five minutes, with even higher resolution available if you like: https://cdn.star.nesdis.noaa.gov/GOES19/ABI/CONUS/GEOCOLOR/2...
Every time I revisit this idea and look for western Europe, I find nothing. Or, very low resolution, or some clunky, proprietary "viewer" forced on users. Is there really nothing similar for Europe?
You can receive a lot of weather satellites with self-build equipment utilizing the tool "SatDump". But: the good old times of 137MHz analog satellite pictures are over. We talking about digital high-rate X-Band stuff (~8GHz) that requires auto-tracked dishes here.
Sentiel-2 data can be pulled for free from the Copernicus service. It's a LEO sat and you often get a picture every 2 days of the same region.
DWD (German Meteo Service) offers a metric ton of data on their FTP Server as public data.
In case someone wants NASA firms wildfire 7 day vector tiles : http://serveur.cartes.app/pmtiles/MODIS_C6_1_Global_7d.pmtil...
> Now Copernicus Browser has also added a straightforward “wildfires” visualization layer for Sentinel-2 imagery that went live on August 4.
I feel like an idiot, I can't figure out how to enable it. Currently I use https://www.firemap.live/ for tracking local wildfires (which isn't something I ever needed to track, prior to this year)
On the left Panel, change Configuration: Default to Wildfires and press the green arrow. You can then select various fire-related layers.
Ah, I didn't realize that dropdown was scrollable! (I should find the browser setting to force scroll bars back on again...)
