NO CLOUDS - 13 MAY, 2008, 10:30 GMT We have received word from the folks at the Satellite Station that there is a problem with their online storage servers which is affecting the cloud data service. It is being worked on and will hopefully be restored soon. We have located alternative sources for this data, but the resolution is not as good except in the Americas. If this outage continues, we should be able to provide slightly lower quality cloud images updated once per day until normal service resumes. Please watch this space for updates.... and thank you for your patience. NO CLOUDS - 12 MAY, 2008, 13:15 GMT The cloud data at the Dundee Satellite Receiving Station continues to be inaccessible. Based on the sequence of events, it appears to be a crash of their system that stores current satellite images. This is a free service, so we don't really have any recourse, but still expect it to be restored in the near future. Similar situations have occurred over the years, so this is not unheard of. In the event that this is a prolonged outage, we are working on alternative sources for the data, but as it involves several terabytes per month, it is not an easy problem to solve. NO CLOUDS - 11 MAY, 2008, 08:30 GMT The satellite station in the UK is having a problem and is not currently supplying images, therefore the cloud data is blank. We expect this to be resolved soon, but it is out of our control at this point. CORRUPT IMAGE - 10 MAY, 2008, 20:00 GMT There is an glitch in the satellite cloud image captured by the receiving station in the UK. This is causing an area to be devoid of clouds in high latitudes northwest of Europe and in the extreme south Atlantic as well as a similar glitch in in the mid-Pacific. This should clear up during the next few satellite captures over the next day or so. So where do these cloud images come from? The cloud images are provided by the Dundee UK Satellite tracking station. They provide five images which together cover the globe. In their raw from, these images are of course half-hemispheres and thus, circles. The images are assembled into a single flat map by the open-source, volunteer xplanet project run by CalTech graduate Hari Nair and distributed to a number of mirror sites. The composite image can then be accessed by programs like EarthDesk for free. EarthDesk selects a random mirror each time it needs to update the clouds. Many other applications use the same list of mirrors. The goal is to distribute network traffic to help reduce bandwidth on individual servers. It also reduces the burden on the Dundee UK Satellite Station as only one site is pulling back the images every three hours. By keeping bandwidth to a minimum, it is hoped that this free data service can continue indefinitely. Corrupt images... Sometimes, for a number of resons, a corrupt cloud image can be generated, it almost always corrects itself on the next update, three hours later. Many thanks to Mr. Hari Nair for offering and supporting this service! Trygve Inda President Xeric Design, Ltd. Return to Home Page

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