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McIDAS Plans for Himawari-8 Data

This page contains SSEC's current plans for McIDAS support of data from the satellite Himawari-8, which was successfully launched 07 October 2014 and is scheduled to start operations on 07 July 2015. See the JMA Meteorological Satellites, JMA/MSC Himawari-8/9 and WMO Himawari-8 websites for schedule updates and additional information.

The following is an update (as of May 2015) to an email sent on 16 June 2014 from the McIDAS Help Desk to McIDAS Site Coordinators and the mcidas-users list.

McIDAS Users,

We have had many questions at the McIDAS Help Desk about our plans for Himawari-8. Here is the current status for reading Himawari data with McIDAS-X and McIDAS-V, as well as what we know about the data from the Himawari Sample Data website.

There are three formats of data that JMA will be sending -- HSF, HRIT, and netCDF.

  • HSF Format
    We are working on an ADDE server for the Himawari data being transmitted as HSF (Himawari Standard Format). This ADDE server will be available to McIDAS-X users in a release planned for June 2015. Once implemented in McIDAS-X, the ADDE servers will likely be released in McIDAS-V as well.

    We chose to do an ADDE server of the HSD (Himawari Standard Data) because it contains all bands at the highest spatial resolution.
  • HRIT Format
    Preliminary testing of the MTSAT HRIT ADDE servers with the sample data provided by JMA shows that the current ADDE server will work with the Himawari HRIT data. These servers are already available in both McIDAS-X and McIDAS-V.

    Since this data is based on the MTSAT HRIT format, it converts the full-disk Himawari data to a reduced resolution and a reduced number of bands.
  • NetCDF Format
    Preliminary testing shows that these images can be loaded with McIDAS-V, but do not work with McIDAS-X. We currently have no plans to write a Himawari netCDF reader for McIDAS-X; however, we will evaluate the compatibility of this format with the GOES-R ABI netCDF files. If the formats are very similar, we may enable the ABI server to read AHI data.

Note for SSEC Data Ingestor (SDI-104) sites:
Since there are no plans to rebroadcast the full Himawari-8 data stream via satellite, SSEC will not be building a Himawari capable SDI.

If you have any questions or concerns, please send email to the Help Desk.

Thank you,
McIDAS User Services

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