Comments on: Ask METARfilter: text weather to twitter?

Question: Ask METARfilter: text weather to twitter?

edwardvielmetti — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 05:59:23 -0800

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.

By: knave

knave — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:04:33 -0800

Check out NOAA's text reports. The "Short Term Forecast" for example.

By: mikepop

mikepop — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:06:04 -0800

By: rmmcclay

rmmcclay — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 06:41:51 -0800

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

By: maniabug

maniabug — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 09:27:04 -0800

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

By: mathowie

mathowie — Tue, 30 Oct 2007 11:07:33 -0800

Most major cities are covered on twitter. I used to follow wxpdx.