Open Source Weather Network?

Mike Hicks asks: "Whenever I experience interesting weather, I'm moved to look around the Internet for reliable and up-to-date weather information. While some towns in southern Minnesota were succumbing to flash floods last night, I came across some interesting information. There is apparently an existing network called EMWIN that sends weather data out over radio and satellite at 1200 bps and 9600 bps, respectively. There's also a Debian package for decoding some of this stuff. On that page, there is a "Modest Proposal" that the Debian project should be the prime contractor for EMWIN's replacement. I know that I would love to be able to get reliable weather reports whenever I wanted (regardless of whether my local TV/radio stations want to break into programming or not..) Do you guys have any opinions? "

EMWIN

[10Brett-T]

EMWIN is pretty cool. I used to use it back in my dark Windows days. You can even FTP the weather data files every 15 minutes or so, although they point out that the internet is slightly less reliable than the real-time satellite transmission. It would be really cool to have some basic Linux support that could be integrated into custom applications.
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Weather Networks

[PatJensen]

EMWIN is a weather data delivery network that broadcasts up to date forecasts, live information and satellite/radar imagery from various NWS stations. EMWIN can also be retransmitted via a radio signal by your nearest NWS station. This is more common in the Eastern US. It is fairly easy and cheap to build a circuit to decode this signal.

EMWIN data can also be pulled off of NOAA's FTP and Web sites. Several Universities also have the live data via satellite published more often then NOAA available via FTP. The NOAA FTP site takes a lot of hits and is a little bit slower then some university sites.

The EMWIN data format, called `METAR' is an ASCII string which contains usable weather forecasting information can be parsed and processed in perl, TCL or your favorite scripting language. Many tools are available to do this for free.

I've written my own tools as I research weather as a hobby, as well as used several great Linux tools. Take a look on freshmeat for weather tools that decode METAR data as well as nicely display satellite data. I like GNOME Weather in particular for Linux. For Windows, locate Digital Atmosphere, it has some killer functionality and a demo is available.

APRS

[jhein]

Since I am a ham radio operator, I typically use APRS (Automatic Position Reporting system), which many hams have their own weather stations attached to, so you not only get the weather data from the nearest airport, etc. But you get it from many, many locations, and it is plotted on a map which can help alot during a fast moving storm. There are several sites on the net that you can get APRS, such as http://www.aprs.net [aprs.net] and if you're not a ham, you can still usually get data from the 'net since many fixed stations gate their data to the net. There are versions for DOS, Linux, JAVA, Windows, MAC, and possibly more. Also, those "trained weather spotters" you hear the news talk about? Most are hams. Go to http://www.skywarn.org [skywarn.org] to find out more.

Oops, hosed the links

[BoLean]

• appindex Weather matches from Freshmeat.net
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    A PHP tool to display the weather of about 3000 cities in the world.
    created: May 23rd 2000, 12:57
    stable: 0.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • E-Weather [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Enlightenment Applets [freshmeat.net])
    An Enlightenment weather epplet.
    created: Dec 14th 1999, 18:26
    last update: March 30th 2000, 21:34 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: none - devel: 0.2 - license: GPL
  • GNOME Weather [freshmeat.net] (GNOME [freshmeat.net]/Misc [freshmeat.net])
    Gnome weather monitor
    created: Jul 07th 1999, 07:15
    last update: July 15th 1999, 21:38 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: none - devel: 0.05-4 - license: GPL
  • Java weather [freshmeat.net] (Development [freshmeat.net]/Java Packages [freshmeat.net])
    Access realtime, local weather information from Java code.
    created: Feb 15th 1999, 13:09
    last update: February 16th 1999, 10:55 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 1.0.0 - devel: 1.0 - license: OpenSource
  • KWeather [freshmeat.net] (KDE [freshmeat.net]/Misc [freshmeat.net])
    A KDE dock applet that can display the current weather outside.
    created: Sep 01st 1999, 00:04
    last update: March 26th 2000, 13:30 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: none - devel: 0.96 - license: GPL
  • pyWeather [freshmeat.net] (Console [freshmeat.net]/eMail [freshmeat.net])
    pyWeather gets local weather info and mails it out to any given email address
    created: Jun 29th 1999, 22:57
    last update: June 30th 1999, 12:53 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 0.1b - devel: none - license: GPL
  • tkWeather [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Utilities [freshmeat.net])
    Get up-to-date weather information for any city, world wide
    created: Dec 28th 1998, 16:08
    last update: January 03rd 1999, 13:23 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: none - devel: 1.0-pre4 - license: GPL
  • weather.PHP [freshmeat.net] (Web [freshmeat.net]/Applications [freshmeat.net])
    Get, store and subsequently display current US Cities Weather Information.
    created: Feb 08th 1999, 19:55
    last update: February 09th 1999, 18:32 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 1.0 - devel: none - license: freely distributable
  • wmSpaceWeather [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Window Maker Applets [freshmeat.net])
    Shows environmental conditions in space.
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    last update: August 28th 1999, 21:46 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 1.04 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • wmWeather [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Window Maker Applets [freshmeat.net])
    Displays your current local weather conditions.
    created: Aug 27th 1999, 10:39
    last update: August 28th 1999, 21:44 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 1.31 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • Accuradar [freshmeat.net] (Console [freshmeat.net]/Misc [freshmeat.net])
    Shell script that downloads radar images using an Accuweather account
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    stable: 1.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • Dallas DS-1820 Temperature Sensor Monitor [freshmeat.net] (Console [freshmeat.net]/Drivers [freshmeat.net])
    Application and library for talking to Dallas Semi 1-wire devices
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    stable: 0.1.2 - devel: none - license: freely distributable
  • E-Forecast [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Enlightenment Applets [freshmeat.net])
    Weather forecast in an Epplet
    created: May 14th 2000, 01:57
    last update: May 14th 2000, 07:16 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 0.1 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • Geo::METAR [freshmeat.net] (Development [freshmeat.net]/Perl Modules [freshmeat.net])
    Perl module for processing aviation weather reports.
    created: Feb 20th 1999, 18:20
    last update: November 18th 1999, 23:04 [freshmeat.net]
    stable: 1.13 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • gwx [freshmeat.net] (X11 [freshmeat.net]/Misc [freshmeat.net])
    GTK+ wx200d Weather Client
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    stable: 1.0 - devel: none - license: GPL
  • Image::Grab [freshmeat.net] (Development [freshmeat.net]/Perl Modules [freshmeat.net])
    Perl Module to grab images with dynamic URLs from the Internet
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  • infobot [freshmeat.net] (Daemons [freshmeat.net]/IRC [freshmeat.net])
    Pseudo-AI IRC bot written in Perl
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    stable: 0.44.3 - devel: 0.44.2 - license: freely distributable
  • KDiary [freshmeat.net] (KDE [freshmeat.net]/Applications [freshmeat.net])
    A diary/journal program for KDE.
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    Displa ys system statistics on an external LCD display
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  • neuralnets [freshmeat.net] (Console [freshmeat.net]/Scientific Applications [freshmeat.net])
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    stable: none - devel: 0.8 - license: GPL