I really enjoy beating my head against
some walls.
It sometimes keeps me from tackling certain 'honey-do' lists!
Since "programming" is really nothing but typing (just ask
Stu), I enjoy using up to three fingers (never more than two per hand, of course!) seeing what I can accomplish with raw electrons and simple, mostly scripting "languages".
WC has more info than I need but I wanted to 'live in the past' a bit and display some 'aviation' weather the way we used to read it on old teletype machines. Thus my voyage into gathering METAR files from NOAA/NWS. There are already many scripts around that can be used to display the basic METAR data. The
real fun comes in displaying the info
after the usual "RMK" element. It's a 'work in progress' and throughly brute-force, beginner-level code. Output on my site is at this page:
METAR for KATL, KDFW, KEWR, KLAX, KMEM & KORDSo far, I'm handling:
- total precipitation received during the last hour
- 6 hour maximum temps
- 6 hour minimum temps
- 3 hour pressure trend (with graphic code)
- 3 & 6 hour precipitation amounts
- 24 hour total precip
- snow depth on the ground
- liquid water equivalent of the snow on the ground
- at least one use of "variable" (usually combining two different cloud coverage amounts)
- rain/snow/TS began/ended
- conversion of several comments reporting types of weather at various cardinal directions
LTG DSNT SW
SHRA DSNT NW NE CB DSNT NE SE SW NW ACC DSNT SE
Perhaps I'll offer a viewer the option to select their own list of airports in the future. That would give me a chance to do some database work, also.