Timelapse Radar

[TNETWeather]

Finally got around to do this. been wanting to do it for a long time. I have for years cached copies of the NOAA GOES-WEST Sat images to serve on my original weather site. but I wanted to collect and provide a slide show of them. Never got to it until yesterday.

I am now collecting the NOAA Infared and Water Vapor maps for the GEOS-WEST satelite and now have them on a slide show similar to what I did on my webcam page. I need to do the same with the Visual Sat images, but that is a bit harder as at night they are basically black. So I need to setup a switch of when to get those and not get them.

In any case, these are on the bottom of my Radar page now.

http://cumulus.tnetweather.com/radar#noaairgoeswest

This is done with a combination of tools.

Perl

A perl script that initiates the connections using Wget to get and then compare what has already been obtained, updating and storing only new versions of the images.

GNU Wget

The web tool that actually fetches the images.

PHP Processing Scripts

A number of additional PHP scripts are used when called from Lytebox to see what images are there, and then provide the XML output needed for PHP/SWF Slideshow to work. This take some time to manually configure them for positioning of the controls and counters, but once set are basically a duplicate of one script to the other.

ImageMagick Convert

This is used when a new images is found to create a copy of the image to the history folder. Since the images are in GIF format, I used convert to convert them to JPG format when storing them as the SWF Slide show only deals with JPG images.

Lytebox

Is used on the website to provide the ability to display the last current images, and to bring up the slide show in foreground when the image is clicked.

PHP/SWF Slideshow

Commercial package used to display the images in a rapid succession for display.

Availability of Scripts...

I don't really plan on releasing these anytime soon as they require access to a lot of stuff that may or may not be easy to obtain and setup on a remote web host for most. The PHP/SWF Slideshow is both a commercial and no longer available product. The replacement is a great tool too, but is $90 per domain for the registered version.