As it happens, I wrote a very similar script a couple of weeks ago. Rather than using the current time though, mine builds a timestamp from the Last-Modified header of the response, so the timestamp is the last time the image was updated, and you can run it as often as you want without downloading duplicate images.

#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w
##################
# Copyright 2007 Jason Kohles (JSK), <email@jasonkohles.com>
##################
use strict;
use warnings;
use LWP::Simple qw( getstore head );
use POSIX 'strftime';

#chdir( "/home/weather/noaa-goes-images" ) or die "Cannot chdir: $!";

for my $loc ( qw( EC WC ) ) {
    for my $type ( qw( VS IR WV ) ) {
        my $url = "http://www.goes.noaa.gov/GIFS/".$loc.$type.".JPG";
        my $epoch = ( head( $url ) )[ 2 ] || next;
        my $time = strftime( '%F-%T', gmtime( $epoch ) );
        my $file = lc( join( '-', $loc, $type, $time ).'.jpg' );
        next if -f $file;
        print "Retrieving $url to $file\n";
        getstore( $url, $file );
    }
}

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We're not surrounded, we're in a target-rich environment!

In reply to Re: Automated extraction of NOAA weather satellite images by jasonk
in thread Automated extraction of NOAA weather satellite images by Scott7477

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