Automatic dl of weather photos

Getting Firefox to grab wx photos during the course of a day

[Stefan]

Does anyone know of a technique with Firefox, some macro perhaps, that will get it to visit a particular page, (with a weather satellite photo), every hour, for a set time every day, then dl and save a gif or jpg? If there is a way of doing it with IE or Opera, no problem.

I've managed to become one of the main weather forecasters for a particular Caribbean island, by way of a page I put up to help bring in traffic. The thing is bookmarked by a lot people, gets a lot of hits, and I've grown to hate it, but it's bringing in so much traffic I have to do a proper forecast every morning.

I would like to grab a NOAA sat photo a number of times through the day so that I can check later and see how I did. Is there some way of doing this?

Many thanks for any help, (I'm calling for partly cloudy with afternoon rain tomorrow).

[mivox]

HAMweather [hamweather.net] is an incredible web-based weather forecast program... it has plug-ins for satellite images and things.

It's free if you keep a credit link to their site... and it seems to handle international weather as well. When I used it, it was Perl-only, but now they have PHP and ASP versions as well.

You may be able to use it to automate your entire site, including the images.

[Stefan]

Hey thanks, Mivox.

I just had a look around on it. Very good resource.

There are two particular GOES sat photos that I use every morning, one visible and the other infra-red. I'm not sure that they can be accessed via that site or the plug-ins, (didn't see them but I'll have to check around the site more).

What I really need is a way to record the visible freq NOAA cropped pic for the Caribbean during the afternoons so that I can tell how stormy it got. They update every 30 min's during daylight hours.

I'm in Canada two-thirds of the time, and I'm usually not around the computer in the afternoons, so I often have no idea what it was actually like in my forecast area... ;-)

The weather for the island in question is very convectively driven in the afternoons, sucking in sea-air, launching it skywards, and then turning it into rain/thunderstorms. Other than passing tropical depressions, troughs, etc, it's the main component of the weather. If I could just grab those updated pics through the day, I could see if I called it right.

[vkaryl]

I wonder if you could set up a windows cron-job for this through Scheduled Tasks.

Edit: Alternatively, how about a feed of some sort through NOAA? I know they feed to weather.com (mind you, I am NOT advocating using that link: talk about privacy-lacking, public-intrusive, information-gathering/spawning/propagating/spreading nasty piece-of-work site.... in other words, DON'T GO THERE! Literally.) But there should be something similar available.... without the dreck....