Google Earth Hack: Surf Report
I recently cooked up a little Python script that uses the excellent BeautifulSoup HTML/XML parser to scrape the images in the swell, period and wind charts for South Africa from MagicSeaweed.com. I used the time series feature that was added in Google Earth 4 to display the data in sequence. You can view the results here:
If anyone knows where one could find the raw data from which these images were made, I’d be very interested. Plotting the data as polygons would probably look much nicer than image overlays when zooming in.
If anyone is interested in the code that does the scraping, let me know. You’ll only have to change a few coordinates (obtained using Google Earth) and URLs to adapt it to fetch the reports for your location.