In the meteorology pavilion of World Expo Shanghai, a ball-shaped weather satellite imagery displaying system has attracted thousands of people since it was put on the show. Developed by the National Satellite Meteorological Center, the system "A Big World on a Small Globe"is created to restore lively panorama view of the earth with the near-real-time observational images of geostationary meteorological satellites. Six satellites in the world, namely FY-2D/EEChinaF, MTSATEJapanF, GOES-W/EEUSAF, and MSGEEuropeF are involved in the project. The system collects the simultaneous observational data from these satellites to make a global mosaic image once every 3 hours; colors of each tuned for seamless visualization effect before it is projected onto the sphere. For the World Expo, the Big World on a Small Globe has become an attractive site that provides visitors the experience of watching animated cloud motions on earth at the spot of satellite 36,000km afar.(Qiu Yi, Fang Meng)
