FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WEATHER UTILITY

Copyright (c) 2006 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>, all rights reserved.
Licensed per terms in the LICENSE file distributed with this software.


Table of Contents:

1. Can I help?
2. How do I figure out my local METAR station ID?
3. How do I figure out my local city name and state abbreviation?
4. I live outside the USA--can this be made to work for me
   anyway?
5. Why do I get the wrong forecast when specifying -i or --id?


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.


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).


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).


4. I live outside the USA--can this be made to work for me
anyway?

If you have any recommendations for similar forecast data in
other countries, 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.


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), you will
instead see the forecast for the built-in default location (or the
city and st defined in the default alias, if you have one). 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.