The Japan Meteorological Agency’s Himawari-8 is currently the best geostationary weather satellite in the world. Despite providing much better quality of images, its AHI has 16 bands which capture the earth every 10 minutes, including 3 visible bands which imageries can be merged into a single true-colour picture.
Download a Himawari-8 image
There have been imageries of all 16 bands of Himawari-8 on RealEarth™ within the last 3 days. By using the direct link of an image, you can download what you want without opening the website.
https://re.ssec.wisc.edu/proxy/image.php?products=HIMAWARI-B03_20150707_020000&width=720&height=480¢er=15,140&zoom=7&labels=lines
products=HIMAWARI-B##_YYYYmmdd_HHMMSS
Band 01 to 16. Visible red, green and blue bands are 03, 02 and 01. Band 13 is common for infrared imageries.
Year, month, day, hour, minute and second of UTC. Remove this value to get the current image.
width=####&height=####
The maximum value is 1136.
center=##.#,###.#
Latitude (ºN) and longitude (ºE). Add a minus sign before a value for ºS or ºW.
zoom=#
The maximum value is 7 (1 km) for visible bands (01 to 03); 6 (2 km) for other bands.
time=YYYY-MM-DD%20HH:MM:SS
Year, month, day, hour, minute and second of UTC. Remove this value to get the current image.
labels=lines
Removing this value will remove borderlines.
Merge three images into the single true-colour one
ImageJ is a free software that can finish the same process without paying US$9.99 for Adobe Photoshop every month. In ImageJ, open those three visible images then click Image > Color > Merge Channels….
Choose images correctly. Later, click File > Save As. PNG is the proper format for satellite imageries.
Bonus: Automatically generate Himawari-8 true-colour images by Python
You could automatically generate Himawari-8 true-colour images by a Python script which was originally written by a member of a Chinese typhoon forum. You need to install the latest version of Python and Pillow, download Generator.py and then use Run Moudle for it via Python’s IDLE.
Please remove one of the # marks and edit values within the last section for generating one image or multiple images, before using Run Moudle. Here are notes:
width=720, height=480
width=Width, height=Height
start_time=datetime(2015,7,7,2,0,0)
end_time=datetime(2015,7,7,2,0,0)
num = (end_time - start_time) // timedelta(minutes=10) + 1
time = start_time
for i in range(num):
#make_RGB(time.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%SZ.png’), (15,140), 7, time)
#ssec_download(time.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%SZ.png’), ‘HIMAWARI-B13’, (15,140), 6, time)
time = time + timedelta(minutes=10)
start_time=datetime(YYYY,m,d,H,M,S)
end_time=datetime(YYYY,m,d,H,M,S)
num = (end_time - start_time) // timedelta(minutes=10) + 1
time = start_time
for i in range(num):
#make_RGB(time.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%SZ.png’), (Latitude,Longitude), Zoom, time)
#ssec_download(time.strftime(‘%Y-%m-%dT%H%M%SZ.png’), ‘HIMAWARI-B##’, (Latitude,Longitude), Zoom, time)
time = time + timedelta(minutes=10)
If you want to download from only one band, please use the ssec_download part instead of the make_RGB part. If you want to build only one image, please set start_time and end_time to the same value.
