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."

Comments

The same weather service

[bherman]

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!

Re:I wonder if their info is superior to AccuWeath

[Alex P Keaton in da]

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.

Re:Poster reveals his youth?

[typical]

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.

Re:Impressive

[whovian]

Now, if they could just offer real time radar feeds, I'd be happy.

Well, depending on where you look for the radar images, getting FREE updates every 5 minutes is pretty damn good. It works well for this armchair weather enthusiast. One alternative might be to pay $7/month for "real time" radar imagery with various enhancements.

I suppose the updates are only at every five minutes because in times of heavy weather, the forecasters need different types of data. The radar sweeps are done using 2 to 4 angles of elevation depending if they want to measure precipitation or storm relative velocities, for example.