Dreadful Weather and Receiving Weather Satellite Pictures

For almost the end of May, the weather has been dreadful today with temperatures staying around 6 degrees centigrade all day, lots of rain (10mm) and strong winds. The cause has been an area of low pressure tracking from the northeast to the southwest directly across the country.

For monitoring weather I receive weather satellite pictures transmitted by EUMETSAT via the EUMETCast system. With both static pictures and the ability to build an animation over time, the EUMETCast facility provides a fantastic way of watching what is going on, and seeing the cause of the weather we get on a day to day basis.

The following picture is from the early afternoon and shows the core of the low pressure area approaching the Wash, it continued tracking south west for the rest of the afternoon. very unusual pattern for this time of year.



© EUMETSAT (2013)

EUMETCast also distributes a 5 minute updated picture, these can be built up into an animation to show how the weather changes over a period of several hours. Perfect for watching the track of weather systems.

I will provide more details of my receiving system in a future post. For now, an excellent source of information is from the Group for Earth Observation http://www.geo-web.org.uk/ and full details of EUMETSAT services are at http://www.eumetsat.int/Home/index.htm

For decoding and displaying all the data received via EUMETCast I use the excellent software available from David Taylor at http://www.satsignal.eu/

On the Radio, worked one of the many special event stations operating at the moment. GS5NB was operating on 40m from the Ness Battery on the Orkney Islands. See http://www.qrz.com/db/GS5NB for details.