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Weather Service Becoming More Tech Friendly
awgy writes "The National Weather Service recently began offering XML/RSS feeds of their
alerts,
observations, and
forecasts. Now the Tulsa, OK
Forecast Office is experimenting with
offering forecast files
for Google Earth. It looks like the
National Weather Service is quickly becoming one of the most geek-friendly
government agencies."
It even gives you a radar image. Works well in bars and cars especially.
http://mobile.srh.weather.gov/
This was long before XML, so they invented their own format called METAR, no more difficult than, say, email. It was standard, and they have made it public for decades.
"Becoming one of the most geek-friendly government agencies"? They always have been!
--
Evan
"$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
Besides, don't they just get their data from the gov't and process it?
Basically yes, which is why they have been lobbying so hard recently to get the national weather service to stop giving out all this user friendly data. It hurts their business model.
Finkployd
The parent alludes to it, but basically private weather companies (many in PA) are trying to shut off government competetion. Because weather.gov is so good and ad free, people prefer to use it. The privates have reacted by making there sites cleaner, but its still not as good. To stop government form releasing weather data the companies are pushing a bill in the senate sponsored by rep santorum (google news search for accuweather and santorum
one story:
this is one of many stories about this.
Basically because our tax dollars pay for the weather service we should be able to get this information. Interesting to note the in the UK the BBC is running into similar problems (its government sponsored as well)
It's even more than just private individuals now using the NWS data. My employer was paying tens of thousands of dollars a year for Accuweather forecast data that they FTPd to us daily. When the NWS started offering downloads of their GRIB US forecast files, we cancelled the Accuweather service and started using the GRIBs.
The funny thing is that it wasn't really a financially driven decision for us. We wanted the forecast information for every zipcode whereas Accuweather forced us to request the addition of new forecast zipcodes one by one from their sales rep. The sales rep would then insist on finding out what new customer of ours was using the data, and the sales rep would then contact +our+ customer to try to sell them additional weather services. We are not in the weather service business and it was very, very annoying.
The best you could possibly get, unless you plugged directly into the radar site is every 6 minutes. The radar sites only transmit new product images every 6 minutes when they're in rain mode, and only every 10 minutes when they're in clear-sky mode.
If you want as-up-to-date as possible, you need to get the NOAAPORT feed directly from satellite. If you've got access to an old 10-12 foot TVRO satellite dish, you can get either a DVB data receiver or a DVB card and the appropriate software from noaaport.net.
Because weather.gov is so good and ad free, people prefer to use it.
:-).
Same here in Canada. The govermental weather site is the most visited website of Canada (about 18 millions hits per day IIRC). http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/
For-profit organizations try to offer value-added products, but it's crippled with ads. And what many clients do not know, they (example http://meteomedia.com/) basicly simply repackage and reinterpret the data the government sells them (I work for the Canadian Meteorological Centre
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