phpweather-devel

Re: PHPWeather: METARs not available?

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

Jesse Lang <jes...@us...> writes:

> I'd like to use phpWeather on my site, but the METARs don't seem to
> be available.  I downloaded the source and verified the URL, but the
> problem seems to be with the NOAA's site.  Is there anything that
> can be done, a mirror site set up?

I'm not aware of any mirror site, sorry :-(.  But it would be a cool
thing to have...

We've seen problems with NOAA's site before, but they're usually gone
in a matter of hours.

-- 
Martin Geisler                       My GnuPG Key: 0xF7F6B57B

See http://gimpster.com/ and http://phpweather.net/ for:
PHP Weather:   Shows the current weather on your webpage and
PHP Shell:     A telnet-connection (almost :-) in a PHP page.

Re: PHPWeather: METARs not available?

[Nick B. <nic...@ya...>]

Hi Guys,

MG Wrote:
> I'm not aware of any mirror site, sorry :-(.  But it would be a cool
> thing to have...
>

I get data by parsing web pages from www.aro.lfv.se The pages are asp
generated and you can build your own query strings to get the blocks of
METARS or TAFs you require. I have a perl script to get data for UK civil
airports as the data is updated a lot faster than NOAA's.You can browse the weather pages freely from www.lfv.se and following the
links.
The urls are of the form:

http://www.aro.lfv.se/metais/MetInfo.asp?TextFile=metar.eg.list.txt&TextFile=metar.ed.list.txt&TextFile=metar.benelux.list.txt&TextFile=metar.alps.list.txt&TextFile=metar.lf.list.txt&TextFile=metar.le.list.txt&TextFile=metar.lp.list.txt&TextFile=metar.li.list.txt&TextFile=metar.baltic.list.txt&TextFile=metar.others.list.txt&SubTitle=United%A0Kingdom&Subtitle=Germany&Subtitle=Benelux&Subtitle=Austria,%A0Switzerland&Subtitle=France&Subtitle=Spain&Subtitle=Portugal&Subtitle=Italy&Subtitle=Baltic&Subtitle=Other%A0Countries&T=METAR%A0Europe&Frequency=30

But from that you can build a shortened query that works(and saves
bandwidth). For the UK METARS I use:
http://www.aro.lfv.se/metais/MetInfo.asp?TextFile=metar.eg.list.txt&SubTitle=United%A0Kingdom&T=METAR%A0Europe&Frequency=30
Then I parse the data for the required airport METAR, start of required
string is the ICAO code eg EGNX. End of sting is the = character.
Martin - if you want a copy of the routine (it's written in perl and a
part of a perl decoder I wrote) the let me know and I'd be happy to upload
it somewhere.
> We've seen problems with NOAA's site before, but they're usually gone
> in a matter of hours.

I have seen probs with NOAA recently, getting a lot of http 403 errors.
(server overloaded or noa available?) last week but for the past few days
it seems OK.
-- 
Nick B.
Nottingham/UK
ICQ9247450