Sanchez brings your dull IR satellite images to life.
Utilising a full-colour, high resolution, static ándale underlay image, combining it with a single greyscale IR satellite image, an optional mask and overlay and some zhushing, Sanchez will create beautiful images to be proud of.
This could be considered cheating, but this is the approach that NASA used to utilise for older weather satellites. If it's good enough for NASA, it should be good enough for you.
If you provide a mask image, you can compensate for discrepancies in scale or distortion between the satellite image and the full-colour image. Sanchez also provides options for batch conversion, colour tinting, an overlay for text or other imagery, brightness and contrast adjustment.
¡Arriba, Arriba! ¡Ándale, Ándale!
Sample images can be found here. If you have interesting images to contribute, let me know!
Releases are available for Raspberry Pi, Linux, Mac OS X and Windows. Head on over and pick your poison!
For Raspberry Pi, pick the ARM build.
Sample underlays, masks and IR images for Himawari-8, GK-2A, GOES-16 and GOES-17 are in the Resources folder. Each satellite has an underlay which matches the pixel dimensions of the IR image, and an additional high-resolution underlay. It is recommended to use the high-resolution underlay unless you care about pixel-perfect IR.
All images are expected to be the same aspect ratio. If images are different sizes - for example, when using the high-resolution underlays - source images will be scaled up.
The tint is optimised for Himawari-8 and GOES. For GK-2A, you may find a tint of #0070ba to better suited.
-u, --underlay Required. Path to full-colour underlay image
-s, --source Required. Path to IR satellite image(s)
-m, --mask Optional path to mask image
-O, --overlay Optional path to overlay image
-o, --output Required. Path to output file or folder
-t, --tint (Default: 5ebfff) Tint to apply to satellite image
-b, --brightness (Default: 1.0) Brightness adjustment
-S, --saturation (Default: 0.7) Saturation adjustment
-q, --quiet (Default: false) Don't provide any console output
-f, --force (Default: false) Force overwrite existing output file
-T, --threads (Default: CPU core count) Number of threads to use for batch processing
--help Display this help screen.
--version Display version information.
./Sanchez -s "c:\images\Himawari8\**\*-IR*.jpg" -m Resources\Mask.jpg -u Resources\Himawari-8\Underlay-Hirez.jpg -o Output
./Sanchez -s "c:\images\Himawari8\**\Himawari8_FD_VS_20200727T005100Z.jpg" -m Resources\Mask.jpg -u Resources\Himawari-8\Underlay-Hirez.jpg -o Output.jpg -t "#0096FA"
Sanchez supports any of the following tint formats, with or without the leading #:
#xxx#xxxxxx#xxxxxxxx
Sanchez supports converting single or batch satellite files. If converting a batch, the output argument is assumed to be a folder and is created if needed. Original file names are preserved, with a -fc suffix.
Sanchez supports glob and directory patterns for the --source argument.
Examples are:
images/images/*.*images/*.jpgimages/**/*.*images/2020-*/*IR*.jpg
Note that patterns with wildcards should be quoted with "" on shells that do wildcard expansion (i.e., everything other than Windows).
Detailed logs are written to disk in the logs directory relative to the directory where Sanchez is called from.
NASA's collection of Blue Marble images is an excellent source of high resolution underlay images.
In order to correctly projection map photos from geostationary satellites, the Cartophy Python library can be used. Sample code is in the Tools directory. If you just want to create a high resolution globe and don't need to worry about precise projection, NASA's G.Projector application is useful.
This is the approach, software and source images used for the sample underlay images in the Resources folder.