Planning an excursion to see the upcoming solar eclipse? NASA can help with that! They provide two sets of data which can point you to good viewing:
- The eclipse path itself (the eclipse will be total inside this path). This is found at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEpath/SEpath2001/SE2017Aug21Tpath.html.
- Years worth of daily satellite images, which will let us forecast cloud cover for the day; these can be downloaded from https://ladsweb.nascom.nasa.gov/search/.
A little bit of R scripting lets us combine these and put them onto a Leaflet map of the US.
Downloads
Before coding, there are two things to download:
- An outline of the US, for clipping the path; I used one from the US census bureau at http://www2.census.gov/geo/tiger/GENZ2015/shp/cb_2015_us_nation_5m.zip.
- A collection of satellite images, from https://ladsweb.nascom.nasa.gov/search/. For this example we use 12 years of data for the two weeks
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