New Weather Adventures

While I am finishing up grabbing hourly METAR data for my professor, I also wrote some code to grab temperature data every minute from a selection of local stations. We are gathering a wealth of meteorological data. One area that I have always been interested in are the text products produced by the National Weather Service. Those are the severe weather bulletins, short-term and local forecasts that you will be likely to hear on radio and TV, as well as on weather web sites. They are not the usual endless strings of numbers and symbols that need to be decoded, but words and sentences understandable by humans. One way to get the data would be to screen scrape the wide range of NWS web sites, a boring task when you can get the same products pushed from several sources. I am working on getting such a server up and running - more details on that soon!