20000302: request for representative sizes of GOES imagery files (cont.)

>From: Unidata User Support <address@hidden>
>Organization: Unidata Program Center
>Keywords: 200003022014.NAA11907 GVAR imager sounder AREA files

Dee,

>Just want to be sure I know what you want.  We can provide you with a
>"grid" that lists all the products for GOES, by band, and their sizes.

This sounds great!  It will allow me to give our User's Committee
members some reasonable information about what could be made available
through the Unidata-Wisconsin data stream; how often the products could
be made available; and how large they might be.  The intention is that
the products sizes would be significantly reduced using PNG
compression.  Some experiments that Steve Chiswell of the UPC ran
indicated that compression of imagery down to 30-40% of their
uncompressed sizes is possible (IR compresses better than VIS as you
might expect).  The other thing about PNG format is that it is a
"standard" image format handled by web browsers.  All that would have
to be done to display the imagery in a page would be to strip the
header information from the beginning of the image (only the image
lines will be PNG compressed).

>Are you only interested in GOES or other satellites too? Meteosat and
>GMS would be easily enough to come up with but POES might be more
>difficult, but possible.

If you could include METEOSAT and GMS I would be grateful; GOES data is
of primary interest.  POES would be nice, but if it is too big a deal,
then let's skip it for now.

>You can check the schedules online at the Data Center web page,
>
>http://www.ssec.wisc.edu/datacenter/
>Go to Archive and then Satellite
>
>and click on the little GOES Schedule.  Basically the US is covered
>every 15 minutes routinely.

Thanks.  This was the sort of information I had in mind for the temporal
resolution of products.  I can condense it into a tabular format that
is a little easier to digest.

As a heads up, I want to let you know that at some point in the future,
I will be wanting to discuss with someone there (you and/or Santek) the
possibility of providing ADDE access to the Unidata-Wisconsin
datastream archives.  The development that Dave is having done with
respect to access to McIDAS data files not named with McIDAS
conventions should allow an ADDE server to easily serve the archived
data files.  Expansion of the work being done into areas that support
dynamic datasets would (like is supported by my ADDE subservers) make
the access trivial.

At the same time, and if ADDE access to the archived data is possible,
I will want to include the new, extra imagery to be added to the
Unidata-Wisconsin datastream in the list of data that can be accessed
by ADDE.  This kind of access should help promote the use of McIDAS
(and our developing MetApps applications) throughout our community.  It
will also make it easier for small sites that can't handle running a
full blown IDD installation to get some of the data they need (access
to current and historic MDXX data would also be very useful, but that
is not my primary concern at the moment).

Tom