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Weather Data Available in XML
wombatmobile writes "Wired reports the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration this week began providing weather data in an open access XML format. Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered. How will the free and easy availability of valuable data like this in XML affect the development of the web? One example is Tom Groves SVG weather. This type of visualization of XML data is about to fall within easy reach with nothing more than a text editor required as an authoring tool. From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build. As an example of how web standards are supposed to work, what more could you hope to find?" We mentioned the policy change a few days ago.
The XML requires latitude and altitude...
Does anybody know a way to translate that for common locations?
Do we get the blue sky of death?
All misspellings and grammatical errors in the above post are intentional and part of my artistic expression.
....Only in Japan.
Can't the XML files just be fetched by HTTP ? Why introduce that SOAP layer? I mean, can't I just wget .../BOS.xml or something?
weather or not I'll use it.....
I'm sorry, I'm sorry....it's another bad pun....I seriously need to talk to a psychologist about my BPS (Bad Pun Syndrome or Backup Power Supply, which ever you prefer).
Don't miss out the wonderful WeatherFox extension for Firefox... crafteh coded this marvel after a suggestion of mine on Mozillazine Forums. International Forecast in your statusbar. Can't beat that!
Eureka Science News - automatically updated
Finally, a *AA action we can be happy about!
Who doesn't like free music?
Engineering is the art of compromise.
old people in Korea will make use of it is the only real question here.
In Korea only old people know thier latitude and longitude.
It'll be easier to parse, but it won't be any more accurate.
EricThis leads to two perverse situations:
What is different from the information provided here, then the one from the weather channel (weather.com)???
F/OSS & IT Consultant
Anything XML must be good. I'm not being smart, I'm absolutely serious. XML is the best thing since sliced bread.
Le français vous intéresse?
Anyone know where I can download an SVG plugin for firefox?
Too bad Linux still doesn't have any type of real support for SVG in its main browsers (Firefox didn't even suggest downloading the crappy Adobe plugin)
SVG: Still Vapory Goodness in Linux.
AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
Download Adobe's SVG Viewer here: http://download.adobe.com/pub/adobe/magic/svgviewe r/win/3.x/3.02/en/SVGView.exe
I could not get it work in Firefox, even with the plugin, but IE works fine.
Follow these directions: http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/windows1.html
So far all it's managed to do is make Firefox use 100% CPU, and not much else. Let me know if you have better luck.
IE just crashes.
I want to see independent organizations datamining the NOAA weather data, running their own models, and making competing predictions. Then I want to see metaminers generating comparative "batting averages", keyed to current conditions, and get my weather forecasts from a client which knows which service is better at predicting the next few days/weeks/months starting with current conditions. That will give weather stenographers like the Weather Channel, and their TV news echo chamber, a real run for their money. Forecast@Home, anyone?
--
make install -not war
Not that I have anything to do with a geolocation project, you understand [grin]
:-) to see patterns of hot and cold move around the country over time...
I did a pilot test for the Weather Xchange folks a couple of years back, and was monitoring the temperatures around the UK and making mpeg movies of location-averaged temperature snapshots - a bit like time-lapse photography. I've just moved to the US and the computer with the movies is on a ship somewhere, but it did look pretty cool (no pun intended
Simon.
Physicists get Hadrons!
This is just another means to get the data. A lot of colleges have weather sites with a lot of data as well. (FSU is a good one, for example.)
Weather data from NOAA/NWS is supported by the taxpayers, data from the Weather Channel is obtained or derived from the NOAA/NWS data and is supported by advertisements.
Weather Center, Brought to you by AccuWeather. But that's it. Not incredibly impressed, yet.
Is it me, or is he doing his best to prevent a slashdotting? When I click the link on his page to the project details, I get redirected to wsj.com.
http://weather.gov/data/current_obs/seek.php
The URL points to the RSS versions of the XML feeds. These have actually been available for quite some time.
bash: rtfm: command not found
...they've finally done something about the format.
There must be "some neocon advantage"!
(From a previous story about the government mandating that all US residents be entitled to one free credit report per year from the major credit reporting agencies.)
That's what my status bar says when I mouse over in IE.
will be very happy with Weather in XML format. She always complained about weather.com not being friendly. Money well spent dudes.
This makes me think, there must be piles of academic and government-funded data out there free for the taking. Sure would be nice if there was some central listing of sources of free data. Anyone ever come across anything like that?
From March 2005 SVG becomes part of the standard Mozilla/FireFox build.
Shouldn't it go in when it's functional and stable? This is open-source software we're talking about, why the deadline-driven attitude?
Forgive me if this looks totally pointless. I know it's just a demo, but why include a text box and submit button that don't seem to do anything?
...are listed in text files on the NOAA server for Stations idenfied by a 4-letter ICAO and Stations identified by a five letter synoptic code. If your city has a major airport, it should be in one of those files. Elevations are in meters.
Contrary to today's poll, virii, spam, and backhoes will not kill the internet--but SOAP will. (For proof, see this image from this story's article)
I think this is a good point. Comparing a large collection of weather predictions to what actually happened would just further increase the accuracy of models until we have it pretty darn good
Excuse me, I don't mean to impose, but I am the ocean
http://www.weather.com/services/xmloap.html?
sorry about the atrocious formating - slashcode made me take out whitespace (what is the fricking point of an ecode tag supported if you can't post a small snippet like this without removing all the whitespace!?)
There is much cruelty in the universe, John.
Yeah, we seem to have the tour map.
http://www.tomgroves.net/projects/svg/weather/inde x.php
just comes up blank for me. Is this the future of the web?
Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered.
... neat. :)
Presuming that this is a METAR replacement, then the format that was "not easily deciphered" is not really that bad at all. For the stuff that anyone reading Slashdot from under FL180 cares about, it's downright human-readable.
Of course, if my presumption is wrong (the article didn't appear clear at first glance) and this is for predictions of future weather rather than reports of current weather, then
I don't want my damn weather information in XML format. I want it in Microsoft Word format. That is an open format with lots of documentation, and it will never go out of style. XML is complicated, proprietary, and secret, and if you put your data into this format, chances are that you will be locked in to a particular vendor, and if your vendor goes out of business, you will have essentially lost all of your valuable data.
I don't want my damn weather information in XML format. I want it in Microsoft Word format.
That is an open format with lots of documentation, and it will never go out of style...
Plain text is a lot better than Word as far as simplicity and portability, and METARs are currently available in Text format on the NOAA Server.
It's hilarious!
Yes I make mistakes. Don't we all?
Dubya has said, in press conferences and one of the debates, that he has made no mistakes.
Doesn't that just make you feel really, pitifully, inadequate?
Infuriate left and right
An easy to use open source XML weather data base app is avaialable from http://www.laszlosystems.com/demos/weather/. Works great if you have a zip code, outside the US you may be on your own.
I think it depends on your definition of accuracy. For me at least, I don't usually bother with the specific predictions for anything more than this afternoon, and then usually only having checked what that forecast is based on. I think specific predictions are only provided to satisfy the people who demand definite and specific information without detail and regardless of accuracy, anyway. If you don't judge weather reports by the exact timing of events, and instead utilise the information they can provide about what's actually going on in the weather system, you might find them to be much more trustworthy and useful.
I think the most useful part of weather reports is the contextual information provided with satellite pictures and diagrams about where all of the fronts, high and low pressure zones, and so on, happen to be. It's not always possible to predict when a particular front will roll over causing a thunderstorm, but it's often possible to predict that it'll happen at about the time a high pressure zone has moved out of the way to let it through, which might be quite likely to happen "within a day", for instance.
Changeability of weather varies in different parts of the world, and perhaps we get a lot more of this information here than is handed out in other parts of the world. (New Zealand is apparently one of the more volatile areas in terms of changing weather.) Unfortunately the only overseas weather reports I'm familiar with are global reports on international TV channels like CNN, and they give virtually no contextual information besides current weather and temperature.
Are local reports in other places much more detailed about the actual weather system, or do they just dish out specifics without context day after day?
Perhaps I happened upon this before it was supposed to be public, but I've been getting the XML weather observations for my area (KSLE) for at least 6 months now, probably closer to a year.
It's a very handy way to avoid decoding METAR, but sometimes the METAR files have more info.
BAM!
This has to be one of the best weather sites out there for non technical people. It's simple to view, easy to read and even non /.ers can put it on their own web page without coding (it's provided for you).
I like having weather data on my site, and XML makes that easier to do. I now have live current weather conditions around my state, a short rundown of current conditions nationwide, watches, warnings and advisories for my state, tropical outlooks and hurricane info and the latest earthquakes! They are all integrated into the look and feel of the site, which is a plus. I had been using http://www.creativyst.com/Prod/18/ JSMFeed and recently supplemented that with a plug-in for my Moveabletype blog called http://www.staggernation.com/mtplugins/#GetXMLGETX ML. Imagine what I could accomplish if I actually knew what I was doing!
Imagine flight sims (or any vaguely GIS-related application, really, including WorldWind) that can take advantage of this... cool stuff.
This info has been available since earlie this year. I have been running programs taking advantage of both the NDFD's 7 day forecast available via soap and NWS's current obs available by regular xml over http. NOAA really does alot of neat things and works hard to make them publically usable. Glad this came up.
Nothing of importance to add, just that NOAA is working to make this stuff work for everyone (hence see the wed story about noaa going vendor non-specific).
I like looking at weather.com's satelite views of the changing weather. They have "animated" slideshows of the last five pictures. Each is a savable .jpg. It would be awesome if there was a way to automatically save these and use a photo viewer to replay the weather for any length of time.
Even better would be if all the precipitation data and cloudcover pictures could be combined into a texture of the whole world and rendered. Figure a thousand or three polygons for the globe and have all the rest be textures. That would make for one hell of a detailed globe. The more memory the video card has, the better the quality. Ideally there would be an animated texture option too.
parent was probably meant to be funny. Anyway, to those who read it as flamebait: get a life.
And XML is optional; (name,value) pairs work just fine.
Yes, and very nearly only human-readable. One gets the impression that METAR data is designed to be printed in a list so a pilot can review the weather on his flight path.
Here's an example of METAR data for Boeing Field, Seattle:
KBFI 060253Z 15007KT 10SM OVC017 05/02 A2967 RMK AO2 SLP045 T00500022 58003
It looks like a space-delimited flat file, but it's really not. METAR does not have a fixed number of fields (some columns only appear under certain weather conditions or may appear more than once, for example gusting conditions or multiple cloud cover ceilings). Sometimes you have to resort to looking at the next field to figure out through a process of elimination what the current field is.
Government documentation to explain how to read METAR data is several pages long. Code to fully parse it is similarly long, and I'm looking forward to retiring it.
Unfortunately, that SVG is sent as image/svg-xml, which isn't an SVG MIME type, so a compliant browser or plugin can't possibly show it...
wombatmobile claims
But the link provided doesn't indicate that SVG builds will become standard in Mozilla (suite, I assume) or Firefox builds. Where did this information about SVG becoming standard come from?
Thanks.
Digital Citizen
...Maybe I spend too much time around airplanes when I prefer to read METAR code :)
Quoth the Wired article:
Weather-industry companies were promoting the idea that the government restrict special interests that have the ability to pay for the data -- like Major League Baseball teams or citrus growers -- from acquiring it for free, [Barry Myers, Exec VP of AccuWeather] said.
But isn't fair and equal access to information something the government *should be* supporting? Who cares if MLB or the citrus industry get weather info for free? If, as a side effect of providing weather info to the general public, MLB is able to improve their entertainment value and US citrus farmers are able to improve their crop, isn't that a bonus? It's virtually impossible to subsidize industry in this WTO day and age, so indirect (and free!) benefits like this are a good thing.
this seems pretty useless as the plugin only works with Windows and Mac, leaving Unix/Linux users in the lurch yet again. Same old same old.
My app, weather manager, is a C++ app that reads and displays these feeds on MacOS X (Windows and Linux coming very soon). It is available for download at http://www.sydlogan.com/weathermanager.html
I've been using that since at least July for my personal weather site. The main reason that I taught myself SOAP was so that I could use NWS's forecasts instead of having to get the forecast some other way.
What's going to be news next? The Census Bureau releasing its parts of its Tiger/Line database to the public? I wonder how my weather site looks up the latitude and longitude for the user-inputted place names...
Can someone create an extension that will allow me to install extensions?
Specifically, I'd love to see an extension that will save my current tabs, restart firefox (after I've installed some arbitrary extension, and reload my tabs.
I hate having to save some temp-bookmark of tabs, and then restart firefox and delete the faux-temp-bookmark of tabs.
Call it, Firefox extension loader extension or something.
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I downloaded all 3 4Gb DVD's worth of it a little while back...
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
but this could be the next big thing in grammar education.
<sentence> <interjection>Hooray!</interjection>
Reading sentences tagged like this will teach you the parts of speech in no time!
This is exactly what NOAA did with their weather data. It is a common misconception that the Semantic Web is supposed to be some gigantic cross-reference, or that AI weenies think it will solve all of our problems. Imagine a web where everyone publishes data in a common format, and everything can be re-used. Want to drop weather data into your app? Just add a few lines of code. Now that's powerful.
Even if you didn't RTFA, the intro says "Previously, the data was technically available to the public, but in a format that's not easily deciphered."
Because the data is in XML now, it is a piece of piss to decipher and use with web standards such as SVG which is itself an XML grammar.
...for a while now. Dunstan Orchard's 1976design.com uses it to produce a computer-generated weather-accurate panorama at the top of his blog pages. See the Colophon on that site for details. If only I had that much free time...
Ydco co
I made the above using NOAA's METAR data in the original METAR format. It shows current weather in the UK. Maybe it's useful to someone out there.
Sheesh !
All this technology to find out what the weather's like.
Personally when I want to know what the weather's doing I just look out of the window or step outside.
Sky subscribers are morons. They pay to be advertised at !
Plenty of absurd database links, I can't help but to think everyone is just joking, but most of those replies look very serious.
The traditional way to determine your latitude, longitude and altitude would be to use a map. Any mildly geeky geek should have a pile of these ancient scrolls.
A friend of mine in the weather forcast business once told be that while their forecast were better than the NOAA forecasts (well you would expect that environment Canada can predict canadian weather than NOAA would you) the best forecast possible is the agregation (probably averaging) of forecasts from many different source.
Perhaps this XML format, or one like it, will make it easier for anyone to build their one agregate forecast from many public sorces.
That might actually improve the forecast.
I loaded their XSD up in XMLSpy, and there are some errors that it reports in the included XSD file: http://www.nws.noaa.gov/forecasts/xml/DWMLgen/sche ma/parameters.xsd
Specifically, there are a number of complexTypes that have attributes that have both default values and their use is required. If you have a default value, you should set the "use" to optional.
Otherwise, a very good effort -- it's easy to understand once you know that weather is 3-dimensional (they have a location which includes a height element). I never saw the previous format, but anyone who can read XML can understand this.
Chip H.
For the last 25 months, TWC has produced its own forecasts by doing pretty much what the parent suggests: using its own computers to compare the current forecasts of the 'first principal' weather simulations produced by government supercomputers. The GFC then weights the forecast of each model by its historical accuracy for the weather situation it is modeling at each location, and produces a 'meta-forecast' for that loc.
Dicast was produced largely through US Government funding, but TWC has also spent very large sums of its own money to finish it up. I beleive TWC is the only private company to help fund Dicast development.
TWC first implemented Dicast for on-air / web forecasts when you saw the new "Global Forecast Center" background on their studio TV set. That moniker was not some puffed-up marketing. The GFC (using Dicast) is a very big deal, and nobody else supplies forecasts from it. The shift from NWS forecasts to GFC forecasts took years to implement, and impacted dozens of TWC internal systems. Here is the offical realese from 11/11/2002:
GFC Now Generating 36-hr. Text Forecasts
Early last week, we successfully executed a switch from a National Weather Service (NWS) generated 36-Hour Forecast to one prepared by the Global Forecast Center (GFC) on all legacy Star platforms of the core network. With the replacement of the NWS text forecast on the WEATHER STAR® III, 4000, and Jr., the entire suite of local weather forecast products is now prepared by the meteorological staff here at The Weather Channel. The official NWS watches, warnings, and advisories of all types will continue to display on all WEATHER STAR® units.
One additional change that has been implemented since that announcement is the deployment of the new IntelliStar® real-time television rendering systems in more than 1,000 locations around the USA. The IntelliStar uses heuristics to adapt the Local Forecast at each individual location to the actual weather situation. For example, the Radar loop is abbreviated if there is no rain to show. (TWC uses a variety of WeatherStar devices at almost 10,000 locations to produce the Local. No other television network does anything even remotely comparable. Developing, deploying, and maintaining 10,000 TV rendering systems scattered around the US ain't cheap!!)
TWC has roughly one hundred staff meteorologists that manually review and adjust the Dicast output, particularly when the 'first principal' models are prone to miss some physical discontinuity. (for example, most models can't simulate hurricanes at all)
The NWS has far more meteorogical staff in its field offices, and they continue to provide an invaluable service for the nation. Computers and private companies can't replace the expertise of the NWS Field Office meteorologists and their $820M budget(FY2004).
My point is that it is unfair and inaccurate to lump TWC in with 'the weather stenographers'. TWC really does spend a lot of effort and money to produce a value-added weather product. The folks here are more serious about accurate weather prediction than most outsiders would believe.
(This post is my personal understanding and view, not an official TWC release.)
Tried it last night, and today, same result.
Did some script kiddie do this as a joke?