-FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS ABOUT THE WEATHER UTILITY
+======================================================
+ 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.
+: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.
+.. 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. 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).
-
+-------------------------------------------------
+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
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. I get a warning when using apt-get to install on Debian Etch
-or later...
-
-If you're getting a warning from apt-get update like:
-
- W: GPG error: http://fungi.yuggoth.org ./ Release: The
- following signatures couldn't be verified because the
- public key is not available: NO_PUBKEY 29ABF7441FB84657
-
-...it means my PGP key is not recognized by apt-get. Since this
-isn't an official Debian package repository, the Release.gpg
-file can't be signed by a key on the default keyring. To add my
-personal key to the list of trusted package repository Release
-signers, run (as root):
-
- finger fungi@yuggoth.org | apt-key add -
-
-...or if you want to be a little paranoid, retrieve it from a
-public keyserver instead (all one line):
-
- wget -O- "http://subkeys.pgp.net:11371/pks
- /lookup?op=get&search=0x29ABF7441FB84657" | apt-key add -
-
-Though if you're really, truly paranoid, you'll re-write the
-program from scratch anyway, right?
-
+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.
+
+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.
+
+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).
projects / weather.git / blobdiff