That could work if a script could automatically could crop it, and then a easy way to choose locations.
The cropping shouldn't be a problem. My existing animated radar script already crops the radar out of the complete image I get from Strikestar/WU and then rearranges the overlays.
It starts with this:
Then it turns the last 10 images into an animated gif.
Then it crops just the radar image out for the base image, cuts out and overlays the color legend and time stamp, and adds the SLOweather/StrikeStar branding.
As far as an easy way to choose locations, I dunno. Since this is modified once for a given location, I think the easiest for me as a programmer would be to fix the image size and then the end user would inspect the big gif and figure out the x-y location of either the desired top left corner, or maybe the center of the image and edit that into the script.