nooblag / bomthegov

Fetch rain radar or satellite images from BOM and make timelapse videos.

bomthegov is a tool that can fetch satellite images, or rain or wind radar images, from the Australien [sic] Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) public archive, and build simple timelapse videos from the collected data.

It currently relies on wget to fetch the images from the public BOM FTP server, imagemagick and ffmpeg to make timelapse videos, and dialog to display pretty menus.

For the moment, it's also particular to Debian-based Operating Systems, prefers GNU awk, and probably a somewhat recent version of bash.

It's tested but unstable, and of course, a hacky hobby project, so use as beerware.

How to use this thing

Install

Make sure you have the required software on your system:

sudo apt install git gawk wget curl imagemagick ffmpeg dialog

Clone this repo and go into it:

git clone https://github.com/nooblag/bomthegov.git
cd bomthegov

Usage

bash bomthegov

will display a help screen to get you started.

More in-depth documentation can be explored inside the program, by running:

bash bomthegov help

or by browsing the 'docs' folder.

Quick Examples

List available satellites:

bash bomthegov satellite list

Print the list of available satellites as searchable text:

bash bomthegov satellite search

Fetch 2km resolution infrared/visual true-colour satellite images of Australia in equirectangular projection from the past 24 hours:

bash bomthegov satellite ide00406

Fetch the same as above, but narrow the query of images to only inside 10 minutes past 8pm UTC:

bash bomthegov satellite ide00406 20:1?

Make a timelapse video from that collected image set:

bash bomthegov timelapse ide00406

bomthegov's Issues

todo: Improve prettification for data displays

Perhaps use a tree like view?

For example, in radar list, something like:

Location      View/Description                       Res     DelT
-----------------------------------------------------------------
Wollongong (Appin) NSW
└─Rain Rate
  └─IDR031    Broad-scale 512km x 512km Composite    N/A     1.2
  └─IDR032    Mid-scale 256km x 256km Composite      N/A     1.2
  └─IDR033    Local-scale 155km x 155km Composite    N/A     1.2
  └─IDR034    Local-scale 64km x 64km Composite      N/A     1.2
└─Rainfields
  └─IDR03A    Rainfall per 6 minutes                 N/A     1.2
  └─IDR03B    Rainfall per hour                      N/A     1.2
  └─IDR03C    Rainfall since 9am                     N/A     1.2
  └─IDR03D    Rainfall in 24 hours                   N/A     1.2
└─Wind direction
  └─IDR03I    Doppler wind velocity                  N/A     1.2

todo: Add a file-lock to prevent race conditions during fetching, when running as a cronjob