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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."
I look forward to the creative uses that are sure to come from this...
Now, if they could just offer real time radar feeds, I'd be happy.
Jerry
Don't forget everyone, this is the same weather service our friends at Accuweather and like minded companys are trying to get to stop their innovation.
I pay for them to gather the weather, why should I have to pay accuweather to give it to me in a more readable format.
I'll let the guys/girls that gathered it in the first place make it purdy!
Error: Sig not found.
Let's not forget about Santorum's bill that would basically force the NWS to remove all of these advancements so that the paid weather services can make a profit. The taxpayers have already paid for the collection and processing of weather information and his bill would make the availability of the paid-for information in question. Don't just take my word for it, read this. Or, just google on "santorum weather bill".
It is the Army Surplus store business model. Buy things for pennies on the dollar from the US gov't, and then sell it back at a big profit to the people whose taxes paid for the items in the first place.
For those of us who have jobs and don't depend on the gov't for food stamps and welfare, services like the Weather Service and Postal Service are the face of government for many. Not only would packaging the Weather Service data be a better service to the taxpayers who fund it, it would also give one of the faces of gov't a more positive look.
And All I Ask is a Tall Ship And a Star to Steer Her By
Yeah, seriously. I had the same thought. "Becoming?"
They had (have?) a telnet server that dumps out data as well.
I looked into writing a METAR-parsing library at one point.
The US government is pretty good about providing electronic information. Heck, GNU's timezone data was (is?) maintained by some guy at NIST or something. The NWS is one of the better government agencies, too.
Accuweather can go to hell. There is a *huge* functional difference to having information free versus inexpensive. Free means that I can just write an open-source client and include it with GNOME to display the current weather on the desktop. Inexpensive means that I pretty much can't.
If Accuweather can't manage to find a single bloody thing that they can do beyond what the NWS is doing (like, oh, throwing effort into forecasting research and selling forecast data), they definitely should not be in the business.
So Santorum is the guy opposing free weather data, huh? And he's the guy who hates gays?
Damn, I really wish that I still lived in Pennsylvania. There's one vote that sure would have been useful.
Any program relying on (nontrivial) preemptive multithreading will be buggy.
The EFF is also asking for help on this one.
*sigh* I can't wait for election day!
"Teleporting Rodents with D-Cell Battery Displacement" theory -- IgnoramusMaximus (692000)
One of the original homes for geeks is the National Weather Service. There's gagetry galore and tons of science. I'm glad the folks at the NWS are taking advantage of newer web technologies.
In fact, the NWS is one of the few government functions I feel is worthy of my tax dollars. This function is too much of a public good to be left in the hands of for profit companies.
"Insanity is doing the same thing over again expecting a different result."
I'm getting the impression that the higher-modded posts want companies like Accuweather to just "go away".
If by "companies like Accuweather", you mean companies that take freely available information and use it to provide a useful service which some might then choose to pay for, then your impression is all wrong.
If by "companies like Accuweather", you mean companies that use the government to take freely available information away from the public so that only they have access to it while still making the public pay to collect it, and then charge the public again for access which we already paid for, then yes absolutely I want them to go away.
If you can come up with any sane sort of reason that companies that attempt such utterly disgusting actions should be allowed to exist, then I'm all ears.
The only issue the public needs to worry about is reasonable access to the data (within limits) that they paid for. Nothing more, nothing less.
Funny, I thought what the public needed to worry about was an obnoxious little company in Central PA telling the federal government what it is and is not allowed to do with the data that we as taxpayers all pay for.
I must have been mistaken.
Accuweather can do all the value-add it wants, that is called "business", but telling the national weather service it cannot provide this data to the public in any usable fashion is not "business". It is showing that they are unable to add enough value to the data they get to re-sell it to the people who paid for it in the first place.
And what are these "limits" you speak of that can be applied to reasonable access? I was not aware limits should be in place to data the government provides to aid navigation (boat and plane), civil service, and the public at large regarding weather.
Finkployd