HIMAWARI-8 DATA DOWNLOAD

The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (ABOM) has made Himawari-8 data freely available to the public as far as I can tell. The agency has posted fully accessible links to the files at NCI via THREDDS.

Although there is some contradictory wording about whether or not you need to register, you will not be prompted to do so. ABOM does require citation but this is a quite reasonable request.

DOWNLOAD HIMAWARI-8 DATA
Start by going to the link here:

https://dapds00.nci.org.au/thredds/catalogs/ra22/satellite-products/arc/obs/himawari-ahi/fldk/fldk.html

Data is available from as far back as 2015. For this tutorial we will be downloading full-resolution files from 05:00 UTC on April 15, 2020, a particularly clear day over much of China. This will make a 11000 x 11000 image.

[Update: March 22, 2024] It appears that only full-resolution files are available now. That means blue, green, and infrared bands are at 1000-meter resolution, while the red band is at 500-meter resolution. That also means the original script I wrote for 2000-meter files had to be updated. The different bands will first have to be resampled to the same dimensions before they can be combined.

Click on the 2020 folder, then the 04 folder, then the 15 folder, and finally the 0500 folder—i.e. 05:00 UTC.

ABOM serves Himawari-8 imagery in two modes—OBS and the highly processed BRF mode. We will be using OBS mode because it will produce the most naturalistic results and it is not masked around the limb like BRF and GOES data is. This means the atmosphere and sometimes even the Moon is present above the surface. BRF imagery has more visible detail at the terminator, among other features, but there is a hard cutoff prior to losing the signal to noise.

To make a true-color image we need OBS bands for blue (B01), green (B02), red (B03), and near-infrared (B04) at 1000-meter or higher resolution as indicated by the file names:

20200415050000-P1S-ABOM_OBS_B01-PRJ_GEOS141_1000-HIMAWARI8-AHI.nc
20200415050000-P1S-ABOM_OBS_B02-PRJ_GEOS141_1000-HIMAWARI8-AHI.nc
20200415050000-P1S-ABOM_OBS_B03-PRJ_GEOS141_500-HIMAWARI8-AHI.nc
20200415050000-P1S-ABOM_OBS_B04-PRJ_GEOS141_1000-HIMAWARI8-AHI.nc

When you click on a file you will be taken to the download page. The only access link that appears to work is the HTTPServer one so use that for each file download. As noted above, 2000-meter files are no longer served. The links have been updated to reflect this.

I urge you to save all four files to a single folder with this directory structure:

[Your drive]:/[Your download folder path]/YYYY/MMDD/hhmm/

e.g

D:/himawari-8-data/2020/0415/0500/

This will make editing and running the Python script I will provide in a future post much more simple; essentially "plug-and-play" with minimal user input.

JMA DATA DOWNLOAD
The Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) is the original provider of this data but full disk imagery in netCDF format is not readily available to general users (I have tried to register over the years but the registration system is unresponsive).

PREVIEW
Here is what we will be able to achieve with this particular data using my Python script and without any retouching:

Himawari-8: Satellite image originally processed by the Bureau of Meteorology from the geostationary satellite Himawari-8 operated by the Japan Meteorological Agency.

All visible and near infrared bands have a resolution of at least 1000 meters per pixel (11000 x 11000 pixels). The red band has a resolution up to 500 meters per pixel (22000 x 22000 pixels).

Revisiting this post in 2024 and seeing the image again with fresh eyes, I think it is too dark and heavy and slightly too saturated. Here is an example from a different date after tweaking the tone curve and saturation parameters to give it a more bright and airy feel:

Earth on April 6, 2020 at 01:10 UTC using a modified version of the script. Credit: ABOM and JMA. Color correction and further processing done by the author

The full-resolution image is spectacular! The Google Drive viewer sometimes hangs when zooming in. Try downloading the image and perusing it in another app.

Since this post was published I have worked extensively with DSCOVR imagery, which uses more traditional RGB bands and produces more accurate color. Too much non-chlorophyll spectral information is missing in the Himawari green band to ever compare, unfortunately.

Making the Python script for DSCOVR available is in the works.

ADDITIONAL TOOLS
Himawari Real-Time is a convenient viewer provided by JMA, allowing you to preview recent imagery before downloading it from ABOM.

K2GO archives older imagery, going all the way back to July 7, 2015.

EOSDIS Worldview is another useful tool to view the approximate midday conditions for a date of interest using other satellite sources.

CREDIT
Australian Bureau of Meteorology http://www.bom.gov.au/metadata/19115/ANZCW0503900400

Japan Meteorological Agency

Mitsubishi Electric (for the preview image)

 

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.