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) 2006-2017 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.
+
+7. What values are valid for a --headers list?
+----------------------------------------------
+The default set it uses if you don't override it yourself on the command
+line or in configuration is as follows::
+
+ heat_index
+ precipitation_last_hour
+ relative_humidity
+ sky_conditions
+ temperature
+ weather
+ wind
+ windchill
+
+These are a case-insensitive match against the start of lines in a
+decoded METAR up to the first colon (:) with underscores (_) replaced by
+spaces. You can see the full METAR for a given condition report by
+passing --verbose or by observing one directly (perhaps by looking in
+your *datacache* directory). Unfortunately I haven't found any proper
+specification for the decoded METAR format used by the NWS so know of no
+comprehensive list of what lines might appear.
projects / weather.git / blobdiff