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.
bomthegov is written in bash and hence accepts arguments in a hierarchy, like so:
Usage: bash bomthegov <option> <arguments> ...
| Option | Description |
|---|---|
| satellite | Collect images from a satellite. |
| radar | Collect images from a radar. |
| timelapse | Generate a timelapse video from collected images. |
| reset | Delete all collected images, and archives. |
| update | Download and apply latest version of bomthegov. |
| debug | Turn on/off code debug logging. |
| version | Display version information. |
Specifying a option from that list will set up bomthegov to do those different things.
Most options in the above list require further user input, called 'arguments.' Most options have help articles in the 'docs' folder that explain their operation in more detail, or you can access help by specifying the argument help after the option name. For example:
bash bomthegov satellite help
will display the help file pertaining to the satellite option.
If an option requires arguments, but arguments have not been provided, bomthegov should help you by listing what arguments are available to build a successful command.
The Australien [sic] Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) publishes various satellite images, and rain and wind radar images, on its public FTP server. The images are organised by identifiers (IDs).
bomthegov is a simple tool that takes your input, and builds a query for the BOM server, returns any matches, and fetches/downloads the files.
Files are collected in the 'images' folder, and are organised by image type, and then ID.
So for example: images/radar/IDR023 ... IDR024 ... and so on.
The folder structure is created depending on what you fetch.
You can run a fetch command many times, and only the most recent images will be fetched. In fact, bomthegov is designed to be able to run as an automated task, so that you can fetch new images at regular intervals, without causing too much disk or network inrush.
Once you have collected some images, you can build a timelapse video from that collection.
To list what image sets are available to make a timelapse, you can run:
bash bomthegov timelapse list
which, will show you a list of IDs that are ready to turn into timelapse videos.