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."

Get your forecast on your cell phone

[HMA2000]

It even gives you a radar image. Works well in bars and cars especially.

http://mobile.srh.weather.gov/ [weather.gov]

Poster reveals his youth?

[JabberWokky]

They always have been - they just hadn't upgraded in awhile. Back in the 80s, you could pull forecasts and weather alerts off their ftp server and as gopher and the web were invented, they gave access to those new technologies. I think they even had a finger service.

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

weatherbug hack

[kcornwell]

Script for weatherbug data... http://www.hotscripts.com/Detailed/45726.html [hotscripts.com]

Re:where is the feed?

[mogrify]

It looks like there are RSS feeds for alerts and current conditions, but not for forecasts. Instead, the forecasts use an NWS-developed XML format. You'd need to write your own parser for this, or find somebody else's.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

This could go dark..

[CSHARP123]

Recently a Senator (Rick Santorum, R-PA )introduced a bill prohibiting federal meteorologists from competing with companies such as AccuWeather and The Weather Channel [palmbeachpost.com]. Now we can get this information for free. When this kind of bill gets passed we need to pay to get weather information.

Re:The same weather service

[Bimo_Dude]

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.

None of should have to pay accuweather for data that we've already paid for. This bill [loc.gov] in the US Senate is still pending. Given that the NWS is still going forward with making this data available, I don't think that the folks at the NWS support the bill.

Google Earth and Weather

[CiXeL]

I'm still waiting for hurricane overlays for google earth. That would really be neat.

Didn't I hear something just recently though about the national weather service trying to cut off access to the free information because they said there were enough free or advertizing subsidized services out here already? ahh yes heres some information on it http://www.livejournal.com/community/weathernerds/ 229555.html [livejournal.com]
The bill can be read here
http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/query/z?c109:s786 [loc.gov]:

Basically private weather trying to shut off gov

[acomj]

The parent alludes to it, but basically private weather companies (many in PA) are trying to shut off government competetion. Because weather.gov [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 [google.com]
one story:
this is one of many stories about this. [greeleytrib.com]

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)

Re:Poster reveals his youth?

[kabz]

Aaaarrrrggghhhh!! METAR, the bane of student pilots everywhere, but it *is* ok once you get used to it.

KIAH 190953Z 00000KT 10SM CLR 24/23 A2997 RMK AO2 SLP148 T02440233 $

It's not really surprising that the weather service is kinda geeky. Most of it probably rubbed off from pilots who are probably in the top 3 geeky professions.

They do offer real-time weather feeds...

[Anonymous Coward]

you just need to get an internet connection to them and get this multicast-data-collection software and pay them some money.

Otherwise you're stuck with the every-5-minute feeds.

Want to find out more? Google for WSR-88D

-- ac at work

For the folks in the United Kingdom

[schestowitz]

http://www.mopoke.co.uk/weather/ [mopoke.co.uk]

Scraping of BBC Weather, but it works!

Re:Basically private weather trying to shut off go

[Chanc_Gorkon]

Agreed. This is covered by FOIA and any law that would restrict this would contradict FOIA rules. I may be wrong, but I think even Top Secret military information is eventually released to the public when it's no longer a risk to our security or our troops which could be 10 years....20 years...40 years or forever...like atomic bomb designs that are 40-50 years old are likely still Top Secret.

Weather information is too important to have to pay for it. Accuweather before the internet was the only way TV stations who did not hire meteorologists could do the weather. In fact, I remember a time ago where the local station just paid for the Accuweather folks to record the forecast. Now they may still pay for the weather but it's usually read by a jock or a paid meteorologist. I wonder what the meteorologists who work for Accuweather think about their own companies stance?? In any case, I am ALL FOR RSS feeds for weaher warnings. It's a excellent way to dissemenate the information. I just hope they have a big enough pipe and let us hit it every 5 minutes or less. Of course that little file isn't much, but when half the web is hitting the feed, bandwidth could get a little out of hand.

Re:Basically private weather trying to shut off go

[bad-badtz-maru]

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.

Re:Impressive

[DarthBart]

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.

Re:Impressive

[zefram cochrane]

The WSR-88D is actually able to discern 15 different elevation angles in it's scanning strategies. However, these change depending on whether or not the radar is in Clear Air or Precipitation mode, where Clear Air mode is more sensitive that Precipitation mode. This site contains a bunch of information about the WSR-88D radar. WSR-88D Radar Information (weather.cod.edu) [cod.edu] Unlike the radar displays from tv stations that you see, the NWS radars do not allow even the meteorologists to see a "live update" instead the returns are every 5-10 min depending on the operating mode of the radar at the time. As well, the various products are all calculated from the base data (reflectivity, velocity, spectral width, etc.) on each scan.

Weather is for geeks

[ctwxman]

I'm a meteorologist (or a meaty urologist - I can never remember). It's tough to believe there is any scientific discipline better suited for computer manipulation than the weather. For years, even before the advent of today's high speed computing, data was collected in a very systematic way, making it easier to compile and compare. Because I know there are so many reading this with the ability to advance the art, let me point you to a few data sources. Each of the files at this site [noaa.gov] contains all the world's weather observations for a since hour. Here's how [noaa.gov] to translate that. Here's forecast info [psu.edu] from the GFS model, a time series for single points covering a full week's weather. Here's the same for the shorter range NAM [psu.edu] model. The Weather Service even developed this free "Swiss Army Knife" program to read them called BUFKIT [noaa.gov]. BUFKIT has saved my sorry butt on more than one occasion. Here are MOS [noaa.gov] forecasts (dynamic model forecasts 'massaged' to take into account local climatology). The NWS is just scratching the surface, but it's getting better all the time. I look at my relationship with NWS as a partnership, not a competition.

Same here in Canada

[Lord Satri]

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/ [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/ [meteomedia.com]) basicly simply repackage and reinterpret the data the government sells them (I work for the Canadian Meteorological Centre :-).

Santorum

[ZosX]

To those who don't know. Rick Santorum (bought and sold by accuweather which is a Pennsylvania corp) is proposing a bill that would kill free NWS information in favor of paid for info from greedy corporations like Accuweather. Since the NWS provides the bulk of Accuweather's infornation, we would essentially be paying a tax on this information and then paying accuweather to present it to us. It is almost like letting companies charge tolls on public roads that were built with public tax dollars. Pretty great huh?

For those of you who realize what a douchebag Rick Santorum is, I bring you the following link:

http://www.spreadingsantorum.com/ [spreadingsantorum.com]

Also, here is a link about his proposed bill to the No Child Left behind act forcing educators to talk about "Intelligent" design. (Oh the irony!)

Santorum Amendment [wikipedia.org]

Here is a link to the wikipedia arcticle about the comments he made that started the whole gay controversy.

Santorum Controversy [wikipedia.org]

Enjoy.

You know, if more young people voted in America, it would be my hope that scumbags such as Santorum wouldn't see the light of day. Campaign donations need to be the first to go. What the bill that santorum is introducing would do is cut the public off from something that it pays for and something that Accuweather uses. Do you think accuweather has their own satellites up there? We don't need accuweather. We NEED the NWS.

Re:Google Earth and Weather

[JediTrainer]

This guy [keyhole.com] seems to have figured it out. I tried it out and it seems to show all of the tropical storm data I want.

Alternatively, you can also use X-Planet cloud map overlays. Set your refresh to once every few hours, and you can see the storms that way too.

Us Ham Radio Guys...

[ki4iib]

...and SKYWARN folks have known for quite awhile that weather people, 'specially NWS, are some of the biggest geeks and geek-friend people around. =)

Re:weather.gov is ok...

[Anonymous Coward]

That's because those local monitoring stations don't conform to the NWS reporting requirements (location, elevation, configuration, etc.), and there just isn't enough funding to increase the density of official stations.

The NWS needs to be sure that data is being collected in a consistent manner, else its forecasts based on that data are useless (GIGO).

Re:Tell Santorum what you think about S.786

[JasonJ75]

Writing your Senator is nice, writing your Senator who is on the Committee where this bill was referred to is even better...

So if you're from the following states:
Alaska - Arizona - Montana - Mississippi - Texas - Maine - Oregon - Nevada - Virginia - New Hampshire - South Carolina - Louisiana - Hawaii - West Virginia - Massachussetts - North Dakota - California - Florida - Washington - New Jersey - Nebraska - Arkansas...

Step up. No need to be dramatic, just tell it how it is.

http://commerce.senate.gov/about/membership.html [senate.gov]

Some problems with this...

[Millennium]

One, the NWS predates AccuWeather, both in general and in terms of Web presence. So in this case it's the private sector competing against the government, not the reverse; AccuWeather is the newcomer. Are you suggesting that if some guy wants to provide a service which the government already performs, the government should simply stop providing that service so the guy can have a monopoly? Businesses have no inherent right to success in a capitalist system; they (ideally) earn their success by being better than the alternatives. AccuWeather is not trying to keep the government from starting a new service; it's trying to force the government to dismantle a service which existed long before they did. Whether the government ought to be providing that service in the first place may be a matter of debate, but it's beyond the scope of this question.

Two, others have already pointed out that AccuWeather does surprisingly little work of its own. It takes data collected at taxpayer expense, repackages it, and sells it. Certainly AccuWeather has the right to try doing this if they want, but what right to they have to say that the government shouldn't provide that same data to anyone else it wants? AccuWeather is not paying for this data; there is no contractual relationship between them and the government. If they want a contract, that's fine, but they should pay for it in that case; after all, one-sided contracts aren't valid.

Re:weather.gov is ok...

[pixelpusher220]

considering weather.gov took me all of 2 clicks to get to Elk Rapids, MI...family cottage location, with all of like 5 friggin streets.

I'd say they're providing pretty good local forecasts. I'm currently outside DC and yes, the local sources are much better; but hey it's a big market here.

Those living in a tiny town in the middle of nowhere, I'm sure they won't have those resources so this is pretty good it seems to me.