Himawari 8 – Better view of New Zealand

Himawari 8 gives great views over a large area, however with New Zealand being towards the edge of the image, the level of detail seen is limited due to the curvature of the earth. Even for people who live in NZ, spotting it on these images is hard if there is cloud cover!

However to get a better view, we can use Sanchez to do a reprojection which will flatten out the image plus add an underlay so we can more easily spot where the clouds are relative to countries.

This makes it so much easier to see where New Zealand is. It also makes spotting the incoming weather systems easier too, so a double win.

Now a single image shows where the weather is now, but to really see what is due over the next few hours / days, seeing where it has come from is important. So I’ve added a 3 day animation to help with this.

All the images and the video are on the Kiwiweather.com website and they are regularly posted to Twitter.