Re: Extracting METAR Data from Personal Weather Station

[Martin G. <gim...@gi...>]

"Jake Ortman" <ja...@or...> writes:

> OK, I know I discussed this before, but the output wasn't as good as I
> would've liked, mostly because the data sucked. 
>
> Anyway, we'll try this again. I can get access to a "metar.txt" file
> from a local weather station that contains the following:
>
> "METAR SNRV 072215Z AUTO 18308KT 13/01 A3016 RMK A02 SLP212 NOSPECI P0000
> T01310015"

Great, that should be enough.

> Any ideas? I'm not a wonderful PHP programmer by any means, and it
> was probably a fluke I got the print_table to work for me to begin
> with :).

Hehe, I don't think this should be that difficult :-) Since your file
contains just the one METAR for your local airport, then I think the
easiest way would be to change get_metar_file() in data_retrieval.php
to this

  function get_metar_file($icao) {
    if ($icao == 'SNRV') {
      return file('full/pathname/to/your/metar.txt');
    } else {
      $host = 'weather.noaa.gov';
      $location = "/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/$icao.TXT";
      return @file('http://' . $host . $location);
    }
  }

That should implement an override so that the METAR for SNRV will be
fetched from the local file somewhere on your filesystem, and the rest
will still be fetched from the NWS. The rest of the logic with caching
should still work, as far as I can see...

-- 
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