[thelist] weather on our intranet and/or RSS feeds

michael ensor edc at wnc.quik.co.nz
Wed Mar 22 12:09:09 CST 2006


----- Original Message -----
From: "Canfield, Joel"
Sent: Thursday, March 23, 2006 5:25 AM
Subject: Re: [thelist] weather on our intranet and/or RSS feeds


: > METAR is your friend, get the feed from the nearest airport(s)
: > to your locations(s)  that report to the service and feed them
: > into the intranet.
:
: so, is this what I get for being cranky about being talked down to
: yesterday? ;)
:
: this is *WAAAAY* over my head. Also, I should certainly have specified
: that we're an pure, entirely completely no-other-choice Microsoft shop,
: so PHP isn't an option. At all. Sorry.
:
: anything closer to a tutorial for beginning dummies? I don't need *you*
: to hold my hand and lead me through, but if you happen to know of a
: resource that will, I'd love to have it.


1.About Metar

"To find out the weather in a particular city, you need to first obtain the weather report for that city. Airports around the world
periodically generate METAR reports, which are meteorological reports of the prevailing weather conditions, and submit these reports
to the American National Weather Service (NWS). These reports are freely available off NOAA's Web site, via HTTP or FTP.

A typical METAR report (the term is a French abbreviation which loosely translates to "routine aviation meteorological report")
contains detailed information on cloud cover, wind speed and direction, temperature, visibility, and pressure. Everything you need
for a weather display.

The only problem? They're not exactly easy to read. Consider the following METAR for London's Heathrow Airport:

2004/07/20 15:20
EGLL 201520Z 17012KT 130V210 9999 FEW025TCU SCT028 24/15 Q1011 NOSIG....."

from

http://builder.com.com/5100-6371_14-5293072.html

2. The above link is illustrating the use of the PEAR PHP class, but it would be useful to
look at it to see how it is done......

3.The link also includes a full list of the METAR abbreviations so you could put them into
an table/dbase and using whatever is available to you ( even regex?) run a comparison
against the hourly reports to extract plain language.

4. One issue, you will need either to set up an hourly cron ( or MS equiv)  job or cache and ping so that
you only interrogate the service when an update is due, ie once an hour.

5. You also need the airport codes for the required locations but I think these can
be extracted from the NOAA web site

Anyway, that is the only resource I have readily to hand, I haven't come across
any PERL references but if you have a quick read it will no doubt enable you to
ask the right questions to google for something that suits your  'shop'.

hth



-- 
No virus found in this outgoing message.
Checked by AVG Free Edition.
Version: 7.1.385 / Virus Database: 268.2.6/287 - Release Date: 21/03/06




More information about the thelist mailing list