======================================================
 Frequently Asked Questions About the Weather Utility
======================================================

:Copyright: (c) 2006-2010 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission to
            use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is granted under
            terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed with this software.

.. contents::

1. Can I help?
--------------
Sure! Bug reports and feature suggestions are always welcome, but fixes and
patches are of course preferred. Contact fungi@yuggoth.org if desired, but
please read this FAQ and the included manuals for weather(1) and weatherrc(5)
before asking questions that might be answered therein. One big way anyone can
help is to provide me with some additional mappings of METAR station ID, city
name and state abbreviation for inclusion in the default /etc/weatherrc file.

2. How do I figure out my local METAR station ID?
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The list of stations is found at http://weather.noaa.gov/data/nsd_cccc.gz (it's
thousands of lines long, so I recommend keyword searching in your browser or
using grep(1) to find what you're looking for). From time to time, the
compression on their site seems to be failing, resulting in zero-byte files. If
you run into this issue, you can get uncompressed and zip-compressed versions
by replacing the "gz" suffix in the URL with "txt" or "zip" respectively. The
list can also be obtained from the following URLs in a pinch, though they are
not guaranteed to be up to date (thanks Celejar!):

 * http://www.rap.ucar.edu/weather/surface/stations.txt
 * http://aviationweather.gov/adds/metars/stations.txt

3. How do I figure out my local city name and state abbreviation?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
The forecasts can be located starting from
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/city/ (choose the state abbreviation
to get to a list of cities in that state).

4. I live outside the USA--can this be made to work for me anyway?
------------------------------------------------------------------
METAR station IDs can be found for cities and airports worldwide, but forecast
data is harder to come by. If you have any recommendations of forecast data for
other countries available in a format like NOAA's, I will be happy to try and
find a way to integrate it into the weather utility, but I suspect that some
serious modification would be necessary given that the data is likely to be
published in a non-English language, requiring some additional input from
speakers of that language for how to handle filtering and formatting of the
text.

5. Why do I get the wrong forecast when specifying -i or --id?
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The -i or --id switch (or the id parameter in an alias definition), only tells
weather(1) what current conditions to retrieve. If you specify -f or --forecast
on the command line (or forecast=True in an alias) without providing a city
name and state abbreviation (-c/--city and -s/--st, or city and st in an alias)
and are seeing an actual forecast, then you probably have a default city and
state abbreviation set in your config. See question 3 above for information on
figuring out what city name and state abbreviation to use, and the manual for
weatherrc(5) for information on defining aliases.

6. Where can I get a list of the NWS advisory zones for alerts?
---------------------------------------------------------------
The lists of advisory zones by region are found aggregated at
http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/zonecatalog.curr.tar (it's several thousand
files totalling well over a hundred thousand lines of text, so I recommend
downloading, unpacking and using a recursive grep(1) to find what you're
looking for).
