-FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WEATHER UTILITY
+======================================================
+ Frequently Asked Questions About the Weather Utility
+======================================================
-Copyright (c) 2006-2008 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.
-
-
-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?
+: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).
-
+-------------------------------------------------
+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).
-
-
-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.
-
+-----------------------------------------------------------------
+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?
+------------------------------------------------------------------
+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?
+---------------------------------------------------------------
+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.
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