Himawari Scraper

The Himawari-8 is a geostationary weather/imaging satellite situated over the western Pacific Ocean. The Australian Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) hosts a public website where the past three-hours of its images can be viewed.

I was fascinated by the intricate detail and beauty these images revealed about our planet – especially when in motion. However the images are very high-resolution and on my slow ADSL connection, it would take five minutes to load a few seconds of timelapse video.

The images are served as tiles with a regular naming system, however, and so I wrote a scraper to download all the images asynchronosly, so that I could make my own timelapses later. As it turns out, the previous three days of imagery is kept on the server, so I was able to run my scraper every morning or two. In this way, I captured the following video (some images are missing from time to time), made up of 18 days of Himawari-8 images at 60fps:

Download: [HimawariScraper_1.1.0.zip 15.7 MB]