Ask METARfilter: text weather to twitter?

October 30, 2007 5:59 AM

I'm looking for sources of weather data (current conditions, forecasts) that are in text formats so that I can turn them into a Twitter weather bot. What I have in mind is either existing ASCII products (METAR, AVN MOS) or derivatives of image products that (e.g. a compact text encoding of a radar map through some kind of image analysis). Ideas welcomed.

The current weather bot is http://twitter.com/a2weather - it's only partially a bot since I have some stuff that I log to it by hand or from scripts.

Some things that have been useful are Twitterfeed (RSS to Twitter, scheduled every so often) and a simple shell script for posting to Twitter via curl.

The radar piece is what I think would be the coolest - I suspect that throwing Imagemagick at a radar GIF and then counting pixels on a county by county basis would do most of the trick.

posted by edwardvielmetti to computers & internet (5 answers total)

Check out NOAA's text reports. The "Short Term Forecast" for example.
posted by knave at 6:04 AM on October 30, 2007

More XML links from the government
posted by mikepop at 6:06 AM on October 30, 2007

METAR data is what I recommend and what I use.

You can use either the station data or decoded:

http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/

This page has a station list:

http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/stations.txt
posted by rmmcclay at 6:41 AM on October 30, 2007

You can get current observations by ICAO identifier like this:

http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/current/KVAY.html

Also the Aviation Weather widget's js code references adds.aviationweather.gov/metars/index.php
posted by maniabug at 9:27 AM on October 30, 2007

Most major cities are covered on twitter. I used to follow wxpdx.
posted by mathowie at 11:07 AM on October 30, 2007