Creating a Satellite Composite Basemap

This example utilizes the land/sea bitmask provided as a grid function within GEMPAK grid diagnostics. The resolution of the bitmask is 0.5 degree, and is adequate for the resolution of the N. Hemispheric Composite satellite product.

Tools Used

Gempak Programs

Data Used

Steps

  1. Convert current IR satellite image to grid using IMG2GD
  2. Create a composite image satellite and land/sea mask using GD2IMG
  3. Create a color lookup table representing land, ocean, and shades of IRSAT clouds for the 2 ranges of data above. The color values 0 to 94 will be divided into 2 groups of 47 with the last color entry representing missing data. Each section of 47 colors will start with the color for land or ocean and end with the maximum value of white (RGB 255,255,255). The remaining colors will be evenly ramped from the starting color to the ending color (a short program saved time for this step). You can download the color table upc_t_s.tbl generated for this composite satellite image.
  4. Add an image type entry for this band 2**(10 - 1) image for sensor 11 (Gini ID 99 above) into GEMTBL/sat/imgtyp.tbl if it does not already exist.
       IRSAT-BASE           COMPOS        0     94     11   2**9      1 upc_t_s.tbl
    
  5. Display the composite image in GEMPAK programs as a satellite image and overlay data as desired.

  6. To create a realtime product, schedule the conversion of the IR image to grid and generation of the composite image.