Notices

Ok, being a bit of a weather nut, I have gone to great lengths to collect information I feel is most useful when studying and collecting information about the current and upcoming weather. Here's the list of sites I follow:

http://radar.weather.gov/ <- One of the best and most up to date weather images on the net.

http://www.wunderground.com/ <- Arguably the best and most informative weather site out there.

http://www.weather.com/maps/news/sev...her_large.html <- Shows all current weather fronts, low pressure, high pressure, etc.

http://www.weather.com/maps/maptype/...ast_large.html <- Shows what areas are expecting severe storms.

http://www.wunderground.com/radar/ <- Another good radar source, although not quite as frequently updated. But it does provide a different view with more information than the NOR radar image does. It's also slightly cleaner with less background noise. Includes stationary images as well as radar loops.

http://www.intellicast.com/Storm/Sev...ation=usmi0127 <- Shows all watches and warnings for the US, or regional. The example here is just the regional view, but you can easily step back from this to the national.

http://www.weatherimages.org/data/imag192.html <- Probably one of the best, most easily readable jet stream forecasts out there.

http://www.weather.com/maps/activity...eam_large.html <- provides an exploded view of the jetstream google earth style.

http://www.intellicast.com/National/Radar/Current.aspx <- radar image for the entire US.

http://www.intellicast.com/National/...x?animate=true < Same as above, but this is the radar loop instead.

http://www.intellicast.com/national/...ation=usmi0527 <- this and the one below it are the same as the two above, except these are examples of regional radars from the same site.

http://www.intellicast.com/national/...7&animate=true

http://www.almanac.com/weatherforecast/us/ <- Old farmers almanac. Provides current and next month generalized predicted weather.

http://www.accuweather.com/us/ <- Provides 15 day forcasts. Accuracy of forecast drops off rapidly after about the 5th day, but it still provides a reasonable snapshot of what to expect.

Now, with that thought in mind, how hard would it be to either enhance one of the existing applications to make use of these and countless other weather tools at these and other sites (for example, weather underground also has a hurricane tracking system, and astronomy and much more.) and combine them into a comprehensive tool? Right now I do all my weather research daily via web links, but if my NIT had a weather app that could do all these and then some, that'd just utterly rock.

Well, this is my suggestions, so feel free to use as needed.

I was just thinking of making a simple Weather application that would have the current conditions in one tab, then a user-defined amount of additional tabs that would display a custom radar image (basically, you input the link, and it displays it).

It was just an idea though...

What I could use is a severe weather warning app that you enter your zip code and you hear the recorded announcement of a possible hurricane, toronado, flash flood, etc.

Yeah, there are websites that offer such a service, and can do that through a webpage as well. Something like that would be really easy to put into an application if you wanted to.

What I've long wanted is a 5 or 7 day graph of temperatures instead of just a high and low. The line would get fat and fuzzy to indicate the margin-of-error in the prediction. The background color at each point could represent clear vs cloudy vs stormy.

This would be much more useful than a few icons that represent an entire day.

Well, Acuweather has something *close* to that, but you may want to consider talking to them about adding that as a feature, so that in the future whoever either adds these into their weather app, or builds their own around the data, can use it.

Somehow, I don't see AccuWeather leaping at the opportunity to better serve those scraping data from its web site. Beyond their terms of service stating:
they're also the folks who wanted to block the U.S. government from allowing taxpayers access to government weather data. Competition is hard!

I don't remember who said this, but I'm replying here so that we have record of it if anyone wants to consider adding the above links and data into their weather applications.

Anywho, I've been researching a question someone had posed to me about the limitation in the acceptable use policy of at least one of the sites that said that the data couldn't be used for "commercial purposes".

In my research, I discovered an interesting loophole in the acceptable usage policy of the weather sites that say you can't use their data for "commercial" uses. If we're putting this data into an open source application, it's *NOT* considered commercial use. It's only considered commercial if you *pay* for the product that uses it, or you pay for access to it.

Since any application that would be built for the tablets would be a free app, and since no money would be paid to gain access to that data, then any use of these links and their associated data within the application would be considered as personal use, which is also covered under the "fair use" laws.

On a side note, as an extra assurance that the usage is user initiated, the app could be setup with no default data, at which time the user has to specify which they want to use. As long as they do that, it's legally considered "personal use" without any exceptions simply because the feature was user initiated, and not developer initiated. Yeah, the developer made it available, but they didn't *make* you use it. You made that choice yourself.

Just thought I'd throw that out there. It'll hopefully put to rest any worries that including such data might get a developer in trouble.

http://www.weather.com/maps/activity...kes_large.html

Just stumbled onto a new map that'll be very useful for someone to incorporate into said weather app. It doesn't necessarily have to be this one, but a good lightning map/radar image would be a plus to have too. Not just a national one, but regional ones as well.

You should see the foreca weather app on s60 phones. It's amazing... I'd love something alike on my tablet - with animations for almost everything (rain, clouds, temperature, satellite view) and forecasts both short- and medium-term.