EGB13

I’m posting an updated animation of the composite US weather radar every 10 minutes to http://egb13.net/weather/radar/.  It won’t be up to the second, but the last frame should be within the last ten minutes or so.  Okay, maybe every ten minutes isn’t “continuously”; substitute “regularly” if you will.  The animation covers approximately the previous 24 hours, and no archives are currently available.  The timestamps at the top of the frame are UTC, which will let you know what period you’re looking at.

The embedded video is a Theora encoding in an Ogg-format file which is embedded using HTML5 semantics.  Therefore, it can only be viewed in relatively modern standards-based browsers which support Ogg-Theora video objects.  From what I read it should play in recent versions of Firefox, Opera, and Chrome.  I’ve tried it with Firefox and Chrome.  It probably will not play in Safari or Interweb Exploder.

The page has a link to a 3GP version of the animation that will play on many or most media-capable phones.  That might play in your browser, too, if you have a compatible plug-in.  It will play with mplayer and other media players.  The 3GP version is higher quality than the Theora version because it has a higher bit rate, and because the Theora video is transcoded from it, and at a lower bitrate, which must introduce more loss into the signal.

I download the radar composite every 10 minutes as a transparent georeferenced GIF image from the National Weather Service.  It gets layered over a region of NASA’s Blue Marble image along with the state lines, the result is transformed using the same projection used by National Atlas.  The timestamp is added last so that it won’t be warped, too.  The timestamp ought to be the same as the modification time of the original file on NOAA’s server.  More detailed descriptions of this process are available elsewhere on this site — use the search function if necessary.

Download regularly if you like.  My hosting plan was recently modified by the provider to support unlimited bandwidth; we’ll see how that goes.

Enjoy!