10.4. Using Geo2Grid to Create Animations

The advantage of Geostationary Satellites is the temporal resolution of the observations. Geo2Grid offers an easy interface for creating animations from Geo2Grid GeoTIFF and PNG files. The following example demonstrates how Geo2Grid software can be used to create an animation of files from a latitude/longitude subset of GOES-19 ABI Mesoscale Sector images centered over Hurricane Melissa in October 2025.

Create a series of GOES-19 ABI GeoTIFF files from a time sequence of data. In the bash shell script example below, I use the ABI MESO Sector 1, Band 1 files to search for files that are available from October 28, 2025, limiting the search to files with an hour prefix of 15, 16, 17, or 18. These files were produced at 1 minute resolution. I then create true color images from all time periods that are available.

#!/bin/bash

# Example script for using Geo2Grid Version 1.3 to create an MP4 animation.

# Set GEO2GRID environment variables

export GEO2GRID_HOME=/home/g2g/geo2grid_v_1_3
export PATH=$PATH:$GEO2GRID_HOME/bin

# Get input list of available files/times based upon ABI Band 1 files

ls -1 /data/abi19/20251028/OR_ABI-L1b-RadM1-M6C01_G19_s2025301{15,16,17,18}*.nc > file_list.txt

sort_list=$(cat file_list.txt | sort)

# Make images for each time period available
for file in ${sort_list} ; do

   echo ${file}
   # get date/time for geo2grid file search
   datetime=`basename $file | cut -c27-39`
   echo "datetime :"$datetime

   # Cut out a box with lat/lon bounds of 80W, 16N to 74W 20N
   geo2grid.sh -r abi_l1b -w geotiff --num-workers 8 --ll-bbox -80 16 -74 20  -p true_color -f /data/abi19/20251028/*${datetime}*.nc

done

exit 0

This script creates 239 GeoTIFF images for my time range, 15:00 through 18:59 UTC, with a time step of every 1 minute.

Upon completion of the script, I add overlays to all of the GeoTIFF images using the add_coastlines.sh utility script.

add_coastlines.sh *.tif --add-coastlines --coastlines-resolution f --coastlines-level 6 --coastlines-outline black  --cache-dir $HOME/

I store the overlays using the --cache-dir option, which greatly improves the execution time of this command by reusing the overlay for all images with the same image grid and decorations. The result of executing this script is the creation of a PNG file that includes overlays for each GeoTIFF.

To create an MP4 animation from the PNG images, I use the Geo2Grid utility script gtiff2mp4.sh.

gtiff2mp4.sh GOES19_ABI_Hurricane_Melissa.mp4  *true_color*.png

The script wraps the ffmpeg video software, and combines all of the *true_color*.png files found in the directory into an animation based upon defaults that make the output animations most compatible with modern video players. The output frame rate is 24 frames per second. The images will automatically be resized if they are large in order to ensure a smooth animation. I chose an output filename of GOES19_ABI_Hurricane_Melissa.mp4. The software can also create animations from input .tif files.

The figure below is the first image in the 239 loop sequence. The output MP4 animation is available for viewing at this site.

../_images/GOES-19_ABI_RadM1_true_color_20251028_150027_GOES-East.png

Fig. 10.10 The first GOES-19 ABI image from the 239 frame loop created with data from 28 October 2025 showing the movement of Hurricane Melissa toward Jamaica. The image observations are from 15:00 UTC.