Integrating Weather Reports into a Webserver?

meteorologist asks: "I work at a small college (300 students) in a small town (1500 people), and on our website we have a weather section. The problem is that it can only get weather information from a town 40 miles away. There is one local reporting station, but it reports exclusively to weatherbug, which slows down computers, and inevitably leads to spyware infections. How do I go about setting up a weather meter (temperature, humidity, wind velocity, and so forth) so that its results can be integrated into an already established website?"

Comments

Try using some APRS data

[teevoh]

Some ham radio guys have their weather stations send the current WX conditions to the internet. Try going here and entering in your city and state into their search. From there look for stations with a blue circle with WX in the middle. Those stations send out weather data. In my case the station CW2113. Click on the date to get the raw packet. From there you can decode the data.

CW2113>APRS,TCPXX*,qAX,CW2113:@290007z4138.23N/087 49.28W_356/007g...t056P057h87b10047.DsVP

Ignore everything before the @
29 is the Day
0007z is the zulu time
4138.23N/08749.28W are the lattitude and longitude of the station
356/007g wind is from 356* at 7MPH
t056 tempature is 56*F
P057 0.57" of precip have fallen
h87 is 87% humidity


Alternatively you can buy a scanner and a TNC and listen to the packets yourself on 145.390MHz.
Some other interesting sites are jfindu and googleAPRS

Re:Wrong way

[Anonymous Coward]

Weatherbug gets their data from a company I used to work for, which gets their data from NOAA (mainly).

Weatherbug Web Sticker

[Ben Beroukhim]

I am a programmer for WeatherBug. You can use a recently developed tool from us called WeatherBug Stickers. http://stickers.weatherbug.com/. It alows you to integrate our weather station data directly to your web site very easily. You can also use our API to integrate our data directly to your application http://api.weatherbug.com/ We are owners of largest weather station network in U.S. and I would say the world. We own 8,000 Weather Stations and 1500 Weather Cameras. We provide data to US homeland security, energy, transportation and much more. Weatherbug is not Spyware, or in any way harm your computer. With such assets we will be nuts to do such a thing. Ben

Re:Weatherbug Web Sticker

[rabbit994]

Your right, weatherbug doesn't harm your computer nor is spyware, it's those third party apps that you bundle with it that do. It's nice to be able to farm the harm to third party apps and claim zero libility when they royally f*** up a computer.

Re:Weatherbug Web Sticker

[The-Bus]

It may not technically be Spyware, but the newer versions are huge memory hogs without there being an equally huge jump in the information being provided. Most people consider it "AdWare" and while the idea of WeatherBug is nice, I don't need something else in my system tray that is hogging up HUGE amounts of resources for the basic stuff that it does. Ideally, it should be a tiny system tray icon that if clicked, opens up a browser. You guys took a wrong turn when you tried to integrate everything into the mini-Weatherbug browser, which is not the reason most people get WB to begin with.

(I did use WeatherBug for about a year or so until it the problems above multiplied and it was too much of a hassle).