Arduino GPS Tracker

The NEO-6 is a miniature GPS module designed by u-blox to receive updates from up to 22 satellite on 50 different channels that use trilateration to approximate fixed position of a receiver device every second (or less, for some modules). The particular module used in this tutorial, the NEO-6M, is capable of updating its position every second and communicates with an Arduino board using UART serial communication. The NEO-6M uses the National Marine Electronics Association (NMEA) protocol which provides temporal and geolocation information such as Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), latitude, longitude, altitude, and approximate course speed. The NEO-6M and Arduino board will also be paired with an SD module to create a portable logger that acts as a retrievable GPS tracker.

Satellite Imagery Analysis in Python Part I: GOES-16 Data, netCDF Files, and The Basemap Toolkit

In this tutorial series, Python’s Basemap toolkit and several other libraries are utilized to explore the publicly-available Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellite-16 (GOES-16). In this first entry, the following will be introduced: acquisition of satellite data, understanding of satellite data files, mapping of geographic information in Python, and plotting satellite land surface temperature (LST) on a map.

GOES-R Satellite Latitude and Longitude Grid Projection Algorithm

Calculating latitude and longitude from a GOES-R L1b data file. The GOES-R L1b radiance files contain radiance data and geometry scan information in radians. This information is not enough to plot geographic radiance data right from the file, however, after some geometric manipulation harnessing satellite position and ellipsoid parameters, we can derive latitude and longitude values from the one-dimensional scan angles and plot our data in projected formats familiar to many geographic information tools.