sunweather

Generate a 6-band grid animation of solar activity from NOAA SUVI data.
This CLI tool fetches the latest extreme ultraviolet (EUV) imagery from NOAA SWPC’s SUVI archive and creates an animated MP4, AVI, or GIF showing the solar corona across 6 wavelengths.

Installation

pip install sunweather

Requires: Python 3.8+, ffmpeg in PATH

Usage

python -m sunweather [options]

Basic Examples

Simple invocation

By default, sunweather creates a 6-band grid animation as an MP4 using the most recent frames available from NOAA. Uses a fast AVI intermediate to ensure compatibility and re-encodes with libx264 for better visual quality.

python -m sunweather

Specifying an output filename

python -m sunweather -o sun.mp4

Custom framerate

python -m sunweather --fps 12

Options

Output

• Produces a 2×3 grid of concurrent SUVI images across these bands:
  • 94 Å, 131 Å, 171 Å, 195 Å, 284 Å, 304 Å
• All frames are temporally aligned, with automatic gap-filling for any missing wavelengths.
• MP4 output uses high-quality H.264 encoding via FFmpeg with -crf 18 -preset slow.
• AVI output (via -o output.avi) uses fast Xvid encoding with wide compatibility.
• GIF output is supported but not recommended due to large file size (>100MB).

Requirements

• Python: 3.8 or higher
• Dependencies: Automatically handled by pip:
  • httpx[http2], tqdm, Pillow, numpy
• ffmpeg: Must be installed and available in your system PATH.

To install ffmpeg:

Ubuntu/Debian:

sudo apt install ffmpeg

Termux (Android):

pkg install ffmpeg

Windows:

winget install ffmpeg
# OR
choco install ffmpeg

Example Output

License

MIT © 2025 DJ Stomp

Source & Issues

GitHub: https://github.com/DJStompZone/sunweather