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Open Source Weather Network?

Posted by Cliff on from the peer-review-for-the-daily-forecast dept.

Mike Hicks asks: "Whenever I experience interesting weather, I'm moved to look around the Internet for reliable and up-to-date weather information. While some towns in southern Minnesota were succumbing to flash floods last night, I came across some interesting information. There is apparently an existing network called EMWIN that sends weather data out over radio and satellite at 1200 bps and 9600 bps, respectively. There's also a Debian package for decoding some of this stuff. On that page, there is a "Modest Proposal" that the Debian project should be the prime contractor for EMWIN's replacement. I know that I would love to be able to get reliable weather reports whenever I wanted (regardless of whether my local TV/radio stations want to break into programming or not..) Do you guys have any opinions? "

4 comments

  1. EMWIN by 10Brett-T · · Score: 1

    EMWIN is pretty cool. I used to use it back in my dark Windows days. You can even FTP the weather data files every 15 minutes or so, although they point out that the internet is slightly less reliable than the real-time satellite transmission. It would be really cool to have some basic Linux support that could be integrated into custom applications.
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    10Brett-T
    Oh, bother.
  2. Weather Networks by PatJensen · · Score: 4
    EMWIN is a weather data delivery network that broadcasts up to date forecasts, live information and satellite/radar imagery from various NWS stations. EMWIN can also be retransmitted via a radio signal by your nearest NWS station. This is more common in the Eastern US. It is fairly easy and cheap to build a circuit to decode this signal.

    EMWIN data can also be pulled off of NOAA's FTP and Web sites. Several Universities also have the live data via satellite published more often then NOAA available via FTP. The NOAA FTP site takes a lot of hits and is a little bit slower then some university sites.

    The EMWIN data format, called `METAR' is an ASCII string which contains usable weather forecasting information can be parsed and processed in perl, TCL or your favorite scripting language. Many tools are available to do this for free.

    I've written my own tools as I research weather as a hobby, as well as used several great Linux tools. Take a look on freshmeat for weather tools that decode METAR data as well as nicely display satellite data. I like GNOME Weather in particular for Linux. For Windows, locate Digital Atmosphere, it has some killer functionality and a demo is available.

  3. APRS by jhein · · Score: 3

    Since I am a ham radio operator, I typically use APRS (Automatic Position Reporting system), which many hams have their own weather stations attached to, so you not only get the weather data from the nearest airport, etc. But you get it from many, many locations, and it is plotted on a map which can help alot during a fast moving storm. There are several sites on the net that you can get APRS, such as http://www.aprs.net and if you're not a ham, you can still usually get data from the 'net since many fixed stations gate their data to the net. There are versions for DOS, Linux, JAVA, Windows, MAC, and possibly more. Also, those "trained weather spotters" you hear the news talk about? Most are hams. Go to http://www.skywarn.org to find out more.

  4. Oops, hosed the links by BoLean · · Score: 3