March 20, 2021
It took a lot of effort and some research, but I was able to get the ‘weather’ page working again, as I had realized that the National Weather Service moved their Apache server hence why my weather radar GIFs that I ripped using ‘wget’ weren’t working for a while.
They replace their main page with some dumb bloated web app, but luckily you CAN find the related weather radar GIFs if you look hard enough.
For example, if you wanted to look up a New York City based weather radar GIF, you have to instead look for a local forecast here:
You then can right-click the image itself, and view it in a separate tab:
If you go up a level, you can try to find your area:
However, the easier approach is just to find your local area first with a normal GUI browser, and then rip the GIF accordingly. This is because I think they name these radar images based on the weather station they’re obtaining it from, or the local airport with a weather radar, etc.
I had to do this for each of the weather pages:
- https://www.weather.gov/okx/
- https://www.weather.gov/ohx/
- https://www.weather.gov/bgm/
- https://www.weather.gov/tbw/
The end result can be seen here:
For fun, I also added cloud coverage based GIFs from NOA’s GOES Image Viewer page too:
~ Sam