Habitat Destruction in Mexico

[Chuck Vaughn]

Hi Paul,

>What is the URL to access these spectacular images Chuck?
>
>The monarch sanctuaries are hundreds of miles to the southeast of the fires
>in the state of Michoacan. I would be grateful,Chuck, if you could tell us how we
>can access these spectacular photos of other areas of Mexico such as Michoacan.

These images I have received myself from the NOAA polar orbiting weather
satellites but for everyone else the same data can be requested for free
from the Satellite Active Archive.

http://www.saa.noaa.gov/

The interface is much improved over a couple years ago but it's still not
as easy as saying "I want an image of Mexico". You have perform a search 
based on latitude and longitude of interest. You can get an image preview
before you ask for the complete file (typically 50MB or more) for ftp
download. Try NOAA 14 first and then NOAA 12. Forget NOAA 15 as it has an
antenna problem and the signal is too weak in general to receive that far
away. The official west coast NOAA receiving station is in Monterey.

After you get the file you need to be able to read it. There is a nice freeware
program from David Taylor at:

http://www.davidtaylor.freeserve.co.uk/software/wxsat.htm

that reads all the formats from the SAA. The data is 10 bits and his program
does some simple processing of that data. I've been using Photoshop to perform
other functions.

The Mexico image I posted had quite a bit of processing applied to it. A more
representive image, i.e., minimal processing, is at my ftp site. It shows a 
good portion of Mexico including the part Chris Durden ask me about.

ftp://shell3.ba.best.com/web2/aa6g/200004082200.jpg (400KB)

The file name is the format of yyyymmddtttt (time in UTC).

Finally I have an example of a true color image (exaggerated somewhat) from
the new Chinese weather satellite that has sensors covering the visible light
range. NOAA satellites do not. They cover red through far IR only.

ftp://shell3.ba.best.com/web2/aa6g/rgcb200005141504gc.jpg (1.1MB)

Unfortunately this data is not available anywhere on the net that I know
of.

I hope this will get you started.

Chuck <aa6g at aa6g.org>