Australian Weather Agency makes satellite images available in near real time

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology has created a web viewer that shows images from Japan’s Himawari-8 weather satellite in near real time. Half an hour after shooting, the high-resolution photos are visible to the public.

For the new web viewer, the Australian weather agency uses images from the Japanese weather satellite Himawari-8. It is geostationary positioned at an altitude of 35,800 kilometers above the equator. The satellite was launched in October 2014. It has been operational for a few months now and six shots per hour are made with a resolution of 5500×5500 pixels.

The images in the web viewer cannot be viewed in the maximum resolution, but are made available quickly after they have been created. At the time of writing, the images can be seen from a time span of about five hours, with a delay of half an hour. According to the Australian weather agency, the web viewer is in a demonstration phase and improvements are still being made.

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology uses the images for weather forecasts. Compared to the old Mtsat-2, which provided one photo per hour, the predictions can be made more accurate. The satellite can capture images at sixteen different wavelengths to analyze the different layers in the atmosphere.