Weather Radar movie

We're having widespread rain in NSW at the moment, so much so that the Warragamba is overflowing for the first time since 1998. It's interesting how much havoc widespread sustained rain causes compared to a local intense storm.

We live near the Terry Hills BOM Radar which is great because I can watch the radar to choose when to go for a walk or when to bring in the washing.

The animation above is captured from the BOM site with a cron job that runs every 5 minutes and runs this script:


now=`date "+%Y-%m-%d_%H-%M-%S"`
curl -o ~/Desktop/radar/${now}.gif http://www.bom.gov.au/radar/IDR712.gif

The captured gif images are converted to a movie with Imagemagick like this:

convert -delay 5  *.gif radar.mpg

I used to be able to make a movie from an image sequence using Quicktime 7 but that feature seems to be broken under Lion.