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* Release 2.0: Heavy rewrite with too many new features to enumerate
here in the ChangeLog file.

* NEWS: List of important changes since 1.x releases.

* weather, weather.py: Implemented support for Python 3000 as
requested by ptchinster on behalf of Arch Linux, conditions/forecast
searches by latitude/longitude requested by Brandt Daniels, support
for newer NOAA forecasts pointed out by Darryl Mouck and Richard
Dooling, custom URIs requested by Michel Pelzer, international
weather stations requested by Milton Hubsher, and fixed a metric
conversion issue with negative values reported by Jochen Keil,
Michiel Appelman and Stefan Metzlaff. Thanks to everyone for your
input and assistance!
This commit is contained in:
Jeremy Stanley
2012-06-26 00:48:37 +00:00
parent 4d25a49d5a
commit 93f58b4538
20 changed files with 728634 additions and 1959 deletions
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76
FAQ
View File

@@ -2,67 +2,55 @@
Frequently Asked Questions About the Weather Utility
======================================================
:Copyright: (c) 2006-2010 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission to
use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is granted under
terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed with this software.
:Copyright: (c) 2006-2012 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission
to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is
granted under terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed
with this software.
.. contents::
1. Can I help?
--------------
Sure! Bug reports and feature suggestions are always welcome, but fixes and
patches are of course preferred. Contact fungi@yuggoth.org if desired, but
please read this FAQ and the included manuals for weather(1) and weatherrc(5)
before asking questions that might be answered therein. One big way anyone can
help is to provide me with some additional mappings of METAR station ID, city
name and state abbreviation for inclusion in the default /etc/weatherrc file.
Sure! Bug reports and feature suggestions are always welcome, but fixes
and patches are of course preferred. Contact fungi@yuggoth.org if
desired, but please read this FAQ and the included manuals for
weather(1) and weatherrc(5) before asking questions that might be
answered therein.
2. How do I figure out my local METAR station ID?
-------------------------------------------------
The list of stations is found at http://weather.noaa.gov/data/nsd_cccc.gz (it's
thousands of lines long, so I recommend keyword searching in your browser or
using grep(1) to find what you're looking for). From time to time, the
compression on their site seems to be failing, resulting in zero-byte files. If
you run into this issue, you can get uncompressed and zip-compressed versions
by replacing the "gz" suffix in the URL with "txt" or "zip" respectively. The
list can also be obtained from the following URLs in a pinch, though they are
not guaranteed to be up to date (thanks Celejar!):
* http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/stations.txt
* http://aviationweather.gov/adds/metars/stations.txt
The list of stations included in the "stations" file is comprised of
thousands of entries, so if you're within the USA it's recommended to
use weather's built-in Census place name and ZCTA (postal ZIP code)
searching capabilities. Otherwise, using its latitude,longitude
coordinate search feature is probably your best bet. See the weather(1)
manual for examples.
3. How do I figure out my local city name and state abbreviation?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The forecasts can be located starting from
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/city/ (choose the state abbreviation
to get to a list of cities in that state).
As of the 2.0 release, this is no longer necessary. In Spring of 2011
the NWS switched away from city-named forecast zone IDs to the numeric
state zone IDs also used for alerts. As a result, weather now comes with
pregenerated correlations between airports/stations and zones along with
USA Census (FIPS and ZCTA/ZIP code) and global latitude,longitude
coordinates and can search among them in a flexible and intuitive
manner. See the weather(1) manual for examples.
4. I live outside the USA--can this be made to work for me anyway?
------------------------------------------------------------------
METAR station IDs can be found for cities and airports worldwide, but forecast
data is harder to come by. If you have any recommendations of forecast data for
other countries available in a format like NOAA's, I will be happy to try and
find a way to integrate it into the weather utility, but I suspect that some
serious modification would be necessary given that the data is likely to be
published in a non-English language, requiring some additional input from
speakers of that language for how to handle filtering and formatting of the
text.
ICAO codes for METAR stations can be found for cities and airports
worldwide, but forecast and alert data is harder to come by. If you have
any recommendations of plaintext data for other countries available in a
format like NOAA's, I will be happy to start incorporating it into the
weather utility. If the data is published in a non-English language,
I'll require some additional input from speakers of that language for
how to handle filtering and formatting of the text.
5. Why do I get the wrong forecast when specifying -i or --id?
--------------------------------------------------------------
The -i or --id switch (or the id parameter in an alias definition), only tells
weather(1) what current conditions to retrieve. If you specify -f or --forecast
on the command line (or forecast=True in an alias) without providing a city
name and state abbreviation (-c/--city and -s/--st, or city and st in an alias)
and are seeing an actual forecast, then you probably have a default city and
state abbreviation set in your config. See question 3 above for information on
figuring out what city name and state abbreviation to use, and the manual for
weatherrc(5) for information on defining aliases.
As of the 2.0 release, this question is no longer relevant.
6. Where can I get a list of the NWS advisory zones for alerts?
---------------------------------------------------------------
The lists of advisory zones by region are found aggregated at
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/zonecatalog.curr.tar (it's several thousand
files totalling well over a hundred thousand lines of text, so I recommend
downloading, unpacking and using a recursive grep(1) to find what you're
looking for).
As of the 2.0 release, this is no longer necessary. See FAQ entries #2
and #3 for more detail.