Himawari

Having worked with Landsat satellite imagery for a number of years now, one of my emerging obsessions has been how to access and process the incredible high-resolution multi-spectral data produced by the Himarari 8 satellite, run by the Japan Meteorological Agency and processed here in Australia by the Bureau of Meteorology. I’ve been fascinated with the idea of using this imagery in the same way I use Landsat imagery, because it shows a “full disc” of the Earth instead of only a slice 185km wide, and takes images every 10 minutes instead of every 16 days. It also records an incredible array of data about the Earth and its atmsphere, recording 16 separate “bands” of readings, in visible light, shortwave infrared and thermal infrared. Some of the thermal infrared bands are dedicated to tracking the Earth’s water vapour transport, which is what we see in this video - 2 days of the passage of water vapour around the planet. This is literally a moving image of what makes this planet livable, the combination of Earth's water cycle and energy budget. It is set to a soundtrack by New Zealand sound artist Dugal McKinnon