insat-clouds

Generate animated GIFs from INSAT cloud cover maps for the past five hours

Purpose

The INSAT website only provides a single image for the latest cloud cover data. Unfortunately, it lacks a history feature which means it is not possible to observe the cloud trajectories in real time.
Fortunately, this problem can be overcome quite easily.

Working

A cron job is scheduled to execute this script every 30 minutes (the usual update rate of the INSAT satellite) to download a new, updated cloud cover map. This new image will overwrite any maps older than 5 hours. A GIF is now generated using MoviePy from the past 10 images (last 5 hours).

Running locally

1. git clone https://github.com/arnav-t/insat-clouds.git
2. cd insat-clouds
3. pipenv shell --three
4. pipenv install (Only the first time)
5. python3 cloudmap.py

Usage

A cron job must be scheduled to run the script every five hours.

chmod 755 cloudmap.py
crontab -e

The following line must be added (the path may differ).

*/30 * * * * /home/avz/Documents/py/insat/cloudmap.py

Now, every 30 minutes, the GIF will be updated.

Dependencies

• MoviePy

Communication

Gitter