National Park weather data

A collection of Bash shell and Python scripts to scrape/collect weather data, web camera images, radar imagery, satellite views, etc. to display current weather information, time-lapse animations, and create an archive of weather observations. The goal of this project is to maintain a library of recent weather imagery focused on Kentucky and south-central region of Appalachia.

Prerequisites

The scripts are used on Ubuntu 14 and requite a few packages to be installed on the server:

• ImageMagick
• GDAL

Web pages use Leaflet JS library to display current radar map overlays.

Example usage

The primary script is make.sh which runs the other scripts in the proper order. You'll need to create a crontab to keep the weather data current.

# crontab example
# The source imagery and observations are downloaded every 30 minutes to conserve server storage.


*/30	*	*	* 	*	/bin/sh/	/path/to/weather/directory/make.sh

Goals

The scripts have a few goals:

• Pull down weather imagery and data with wget or curl.
• Process the imagery with convert and montage to make thumbnails, add date stamps, and optimize for web viewing
• Scrape text data with sed,awk, and pcregrep to format and serve on a web page.
• Create animated gifs for national park webcams and archive the imagery with a unique URL every day.
• Create a raster tileset for the latest doppler radar for the Daniel Boone National Forest and serve on a slippy map.

Live examples

• GOES-16 slippy map (https://www.outragegis.com/weather/goes16)
• Great Smoky Mountains National Park live weather (https://www.outragegis.com/weather/grsm/)
• Archive of time-lapse imagery for the Great Smoky Mountains (https://www.outragegis.com/weather/img/animation/)
• Cumberland Gap National Historical Park live weather (https://www.outragegis.com/weather/gap)
• Latest radar for the Daniel Boone country (https://www.sheltoweetrace.com/hike/radar.html)
• GOES-16 imagery, satellite view (https://www.outragegis.com/weather/goes16/current.jpg)
  • Past two-hour animation: https://www.outragegis.com/weather/goes16/animation.gif
  • Yesterday's animation: https://www.outragegis.com/weather/goes16/yesterday.gif

Data sources

The source data primarily comes from the National Weather Service and various NOAA agencies. The exact URLs are shown in the get-webobv.sh and get-img.sh scripts. Also using/exploring the Dark Sky API for hyperlocal data. The Weather Underground API for RSS feeds has also been used in the past. Imagery for the GOES-16 satellite is downloaded from GOES on AWS and, in the past, the UW-Madison Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, https://www.aos.wisc.edu/.

Author

outrageGIS mapping makes trails maps to carry into the backcountry. Knowing the weather is pretty helpful.

History

The first use of the scripts was in June, 2007.