Digital Atmosphere (DA) does not have the native ability to produce and display images from satellite (GOES) data. David Taylor has written a simple tool GINIview designed such that it can be easily invoked within DA, via its scripting capability, to automatically produce and display images from the satellite data files received by noaaport. The sample scripts provided in the dasatscripts package are meant to illustrate how this can be accomplished.
The current collection of scripts can be downloaded from the Software section, and they complement the original scripts for producing various maps (e.g., surface maps), and radar images. The package dasatdata.zip contains a couple of sample data files and the images produced from them by the scripts.
GINIview takes as input the data file in uncompressed form. This is not the raw data file received from noaaport, which consists of many frames each one individually compressed and is the type of file that, for example, Gempak takes. The files must be processed after being received and saved in uncompressed form before the scripts can use them.
In an nbsp installation this step is carried out by the rstfilter. This filter does two things: it creates the satellite images (this is carried out natively by the nbsp tools, independently of GINIview or DA), and it uncompresses the data files. The satellite images are sent over the network or whetever, while the uncompressed file is saved for future reuse. This is where the DA/GINIview scripts get it from.
In the current nbsp distribution, the step of saving the uncompressed file is not enabled by default. The next version of nbsp, which will be available soon, will have this feature enabled by default, so that the scripts will work with an out-of-the-box nbsp installation, without further requirements.