ECSS2023-140
https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-140
11th European Conference on Severe Storms
© Author(s) 2023. This work is distributed under
the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.

SIFT - An interactive tool for satellite data visualisation and analysis

Andrea Meraner, Johan Strandgren, and Sauli Joro
Andrea Meraner et al.
  • EUMETSAT, Darmstadt, Germany

Meteorological satellites continuously provide a wealth of data while observing the weather from space. With the next generation satellites and space-borne imagers, the spatial resolution, temporal resolution and spatial/spectral coverage is increasing, further increasing the amount of data. While this is certainly useful for severe weather monitoring and forecasting, it also puts high demands on the tools used to read, process, visualise and analyse the data. The heterogeneous nature of both the satellite data as well as possible reference data from e.g. ground-based networks requires further flexibility and modularity for effective data handling. Similarly, it is usually not feasible for a single user or user group to be familiar with all the different satellite data formats including how to open the files and how to extract and visualize the relevant data.

The Satellite Information Familiarization Tool – SIFT – is a free and open source interactive tool initially developed at SSEC University of Wisconsin for the visualisation and analysis of satellite imagery data. In preparation for Meteosat Third Generation (MTG) and the launch of the Flexible Combined Imager (FCI) and Lightning Imager (LI) in 2022, EUMETSAT has further developed SIFT, with the main objective of having an easy to use and responsive software compatible with data from different instruments that can be used for different tasks including e.g. data visualization and analysis, Cal/Val activities and training. SIFT also utilises several of the Pytroll open source libraries (e.g. Satpy) to read and process the data, thus enabling access to the visualization and analysis of a multitude of different data sources.

The new version of SIFT, including the latest developments led by EUMETSAT, is expected to be released to users in 2023 and with this presentation we want to show potential users how this tool can be used to visualize satellite data for severe storm analysis including a live demonstration.

How to cite: Meraner, A., Strandgren, J., and Joro, S.: SIFT - An interactive tool for satellite data visualisation and analysis, 11th European Conference on Severe Storms, Bucharest, Romania, 8–12 May 2023, ECSS2023-140, https://doi.org/10.5194/ecss2023-140, 2023.