# Earthlove: the cloud layer

> Every cloud on Earth, from five geostationary weather satellites (GOES-19, GOES-18, Himawari-9, MTG-I1, Meteosat-9), blended into one global field every ten minutes, about 75 minutes behind real time. The archive runs from 2026-08-12 to now. These endpoints draw it as plain pictures, filmstrips and mp4 clips for any place and time, for AI agents and scripts. The art piece itself is https://earthlove.live/globe/.

All endpoints are GET, keyless, CORS-open, and cached at the edge (a past time never changes). Times are UTC. Rate limits per IP address: 30 a minute for picture, filmstrip and catalog, 6 a minute for animation; past them the answer is HTTP 429, so wait a minute.

## Endpoints

- [Catalog](https://earthlove.live/api/catalog): JSON. The time range, the newest frame, the grid, every endpoint with an example, and curated moments (named hurricanes, an eclipse shadow) with ready links. Read this first.
- [Picture](https://earthlove.live/api/picture?t=now&lat=38.7&lon=-9.1&km=2000): JPEG of one moment. White cloud at its measured opacity over a daytime ground everywhere (no night shading).
- [Filmstrip](https://earthlove.live/api/filmstrip?to=now&n=6&lat=25&lon=-80&km=2500): one JPEG of n frames over a span, each labelled with its UTC time. The way for a model to see the weather move.
- [Animation](https://earthlove.live/api/animation?to=now&bbox=-100,15,-70,35): H.264 mp4, one frame per ten minutes (default: the last 24 h). Takes 10-60 s to render the first time.
- MCP server: `https://earthlove.live/api/mcp` (Streamable HTTP, stateless, no auth). Tools: catalog, moments, picture, filmstrip, animation, globe (the interactive globe embedded in the chat), send_feedback (a note to the makers, emailed to the team). Hosts that support MCP Apps (claude.ai) show pictures full width and play animations in the chat. Add it to Claude as a custom connector with that URL.

## Parameters

- `t` (picture), `from` / `to` (filmstrip, animation): `YYYY-MM-DDTHHMMZ` (a ten-minute slot), any ISO time, or `now`. Rounded down to the slot. Default `to` = now, `from` = 24 h before `to`.
- Place: `lat`, `lon` (degrees) and `km` (view width, default 3000), with `aspect` (width/height, default 4/3); or `bbox=west,south,east,north`. No parameters = the whole globe. Data covers latitude -72.4 to 72.4; a view may not cross longitude +/-180 (yet).
- `w`: output width in pixels (picture <= 2048, animation <= 1280, filmstrip per frame <= 768), and never more than twice the data pixels in view: a narrow view comes back small rather than blurry.
- `style=opacity` (picture, animation): the cloud-opacity field itself in grey, 0 = clear, 255 = opaque. For measuring rather than looking.
- `style=height` (picture only): the cloud-top height in grey, 0..255 = 0..16 km (header `X-Height-Km-Max`), ~20 km pixels; the agencies' retrieved tops where they exist, an estimate from the cloud's temperature elsewhere; meaningless where the opacity is low.
- `n` (filmstrip): 2 to 12 frames. `fps` (animation): 1 to 30, default 12. An animation holds at most 145 frames (24 h).

Response headers say what was drawn: `X-Slot` (or `X-From`, `X-To`, `X-Slots`), `X-Bbox` (the exact west,south,east,north), `X-Km-Per-Px` (the detail the data has: one source pixel, about 10 km at the equator, 2.4 km from the tiles; a wider `w` does not add detail).

## Notes

- Detail: a zoomed-in picture of the newest scan (`t=now`) or of any ten-minute scan of the last month (from 6 Oct 2026), sunlit side, is drawn from the globe's 0.6 km tiles; on the live days (about the last ten) pictures and filmstrips use its 2.4 km tiles, over the week's own ground; older days and animations use the 10 km base. `X-Km-Per-Px` says which you got.
- The projection is equirectangular (plate carree): a picture's pixels map linearly to longitude and latitude inside `X-Bbox`.
- Night clouds are seen in infrared, so they are there at night too, drawn the same way.
- The page's own files (`/globe/clouds.json`, the clips on clouds.sourcelibrary.org) are coded for its shader and look like noise if opened directly; use the endpoints above.
- Credit: earthlove.live. GOES-19 and GOES-18 (NOAA, public domain), Himawari-9 (JMA, shared by JAXA), MTG-I1 and Meteosat-9 (contains modified EUMETSAT data). Ground: NASA Blue Marble.