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South Lake Tahoe Caldor Fire Timelapse
Sentinalhub Playground is an excellent resource for near real time, albeit not quite google earth 1m resolution, satellite images. One of the cool features is being able to adjust the mapping of the satellite bands to RGB outputs. For example, using Sentinel-2 L2A image data of South Lake Tahoe between 2021-08-17 and 2021-09-01 and remapping the 2190nm (SWIR2) to red, which tends to highlight fires though isn’t thermal, 783nm to green, a vegetation band (though it is NIR to humans) to make vegetation cover more obvious, and 443nm to blue instead of 490nm as shorter wavelengths tend to be scattered more by aerosols and smoke the fire line (bright red) and smoke (obvs) is very visible while vegetation is (false) green. Burnt earth shows as dark red, compared to bare ground, which tends to show tan in this mapping, thus revealing the current line of fire, the recently burned areas, and the wind direction carrying smoke, which tends to correlate with the advancing line, and fuel (vegetation) still standing.
Then using the history controller to generate and save a sequence of stills, we can animate the progress of the fire with a simple FFMPEG command:
ffmpeg -framerate 1 -pattern_type glob -i '*.jpg' -vf crop=1754:1146 -c:v libx264 -r 30 -pix_fmt yuv420p fire.mp4
and you get:
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Kitty Poop
Many years ago (21 years, 9 months as of this post), I used some as-of-then only slightly out of date equipment to record a one week time lapse of the cats’ litter box.
I found the video on a CD-ROM (remember those?) and thought I’d see if it was still usable. It wasn’t – Quicktime had abandoned support for most of the 1990’s era codecs, and as it was pre-internet, there just wasn’t any support any more. I had to fire up my old Mac 9500, which booted just fine after years of sitting, even if most of the rubber feet on the peripherals had long since turned to goo. The OS9 version of QT let me resave as uncompressed, which of course was way too big for the massive dual 9GB drives in that machine. Youtube would eat the uncompressed format and this critical archival record is preserved for a little longer.
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Visiting the Burj Khalifa
Dubai is an interesting contrast to Iraq. The first time I went through DXB from BSR it was more than a little culture shock. Getting out of the airport only amplifies the experience.
Jared and I had dinner at the Mall of Dubai and before eating had a little walk around the fountains – the largest dancing fountains in the world at the foot of the tallest man-made structure in the world.
Dubai is an good place to spot cars. Obviously the gold accented rolls is more pose-worthy than the $450k GTO. Then again they were probably posing with the license plate number which I think was 1, and therefore cost as much as 20 Ferrari GTOs.
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On the Road in Iraq
We took a very nice tour from Baghdad to Basrah by car. The countryside is pretty amazing, from the relative lushness of the fertile crescent to the desert sands of the south to the marshes of the deep south and the distant flare gas fires on the horizon.
Normal flare gas
[quicktime width=”560″ height=”310″]http://www.blackrosetech.com/gessel/wp-content/uploads/2011/05/blowout.mov[/quicktime]
Ut oh, blow out…
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