Vortex View by Saramoira Shields

Vortex View is a public app for browsing, visualizing and downloading tropical cyclone imagery from the NOAA GOES-16 satellite mesoscale dataset. GOES-16 mesoscales are moveable satellite regions that create 1000 x 1000km infrared images approximately once a minute, and are used to track major weather events. This project started out as a way for me to determine which tropical cyclones were captured by the GOES-16 mesoscale sectors, simply so I could download those datasets and use them for machine learning projects. As I got deeper into the project I realized building a browsable archive for others to use could be a helpful thing for the storm community, as well as anyone looking for colorized storm images and basic storm information.

Users can browse by storm and timestamp, and can apply eight colorization options commonly used in weather forecasting to each image. In addition, there is an interactive 3d plot option that plots the clean long wave infrared data in the z axis to give a better sense of cloud shape and height. All processing is done on-demand in the cloud, and once processed users can download image files in JPG and PNG format. In addition, users can download the associated raw data file in NetCDF format directly from the GOES-16 repository on AWS.

In addition to the imaging options, there is an interactive plot of the storm path and position of the two GOES-16 mesoscale sectors at each timestamp, as well as a plot of the storm's pressure and maximum wind speeds.

This is an ongoing project, and I am working on adding data from GOES-17 (including storms in the eastern pacific) as well as browsing features based on feedback from academic communities and the public.