animate-earth-null

A Node.JS script to animate earth.nullschool.net

Usage

Make sure to install and configure Chromium web driver. The version of the web driver you download must match the version of the Chrome you are using.
Install the package dependencies
```
npm install
```
Edit constants.mjs depending on your needs. Get the values from URL of the browser with earth.nullschool.net.
Run the script
```
npm run dev
```

Go to the processedDir as in constants.mjs and run ffmpeg to stich the pngs into video.

ffmpeg -pattern_type glob -r 15 -f image2 -i "*.png" -vf "pad=ceil(iw/2)*2:ceil(ih/2)\*2" -vcodec libx264 -crf 25 -pix_fmt yuv420p test.mp4

Following are some of the animations that were made using this code. Most of them are used in my blog.

Contributions are welcome, particularly in these areas:

Currently the console.log of a particular string is used to detect completion of rendering event. A better way is required to do this.
The stages (scrape, preprocess, convert) can all be done via npm package scripts.
An ffmpeg wrapper could be used in node to make the process of ffmpeg readable and understandable
More animation parameters could be explored -- Currently, animation happens only w.r.t time; anination in other axis (such as earth's rotation) could yield some interesting results.
You add more!

earth.nullschool.net for making amazing data available at fingertips, with zero-barrier to access.
@cambecc for creating it!