An advanced technique for Meteosat cloud animation

An advanced technique for Meteosat cloud animation is presented. The main principle is a “dual approach” for the separation of thematic satellite data information as land/water and clouds: based on combined thresholding procedures, cloud picture elements (pixels) are extracted and intermediate cloud images are created by linear interpolation to get eight images per hour. Secondly, an attractive cloudfree view of the Earth surface (land/water) is created as a texture map based on a two month time series of Meteosat imagery including a digital bathymetric ocean model. This background image shows the Meteosat hemisphere in 25-km resolution consisting of visible data, infrared data, and a synthetic channel derived on VIS and IR data representing “near infrared” features for land surfaces. Ocean areas are masked with high resolution using World Data Bank II and coded in blue accordingly to water depth given by ETOPO5. The cloud layers are then digitally merged with the background image and written to a video disk. As a result of this technique, a realistic long-term animation is available showing the weather dynamics of Meteosat data for educational and presentation purposes