meteor.py

A simple script written in about 4 hours that gets the weather. wttr.in was giving somewhat inaccurate results and we found the National Weather Service API one day, so we figured that we ought as well spend a little bit of time and have some fun with it.

Usage

meteor.py lat lon

lat and lon are the latitude & longitude of a particular point in the United States (e.g. 38.57 -121.48 is within Sacramento, California)

TODO / Issues

• Geocoding would make this a little more usable. NWS lists several potential services
• Round decimals to 4 places ourselves to avoid errors
• Use the /gridpoints/gridId/gridX,gridY endpoint to generate our own forecast with things like probabilityOfPrecipitation
• Fancy output like wttr.in
• Display the names of the zones (requires extra API calls - cacheable for a long duration, though)
• Shorter alert descriptions (parameters.NWSheadline[0] instead of description)
• Work around known issues in the NWS API:
  • retry when gridpoints 500s
  • reduce gridX and gridY by 1 for AFC (AER/ALU), AFG, AJK, BOX, CAE, DLH, FSD, HGX, HNX, LIX, LWX, MAF, MFR, MLB, MRX, MTR, PIH offices/gridIds

Reference

• National Weather Service API Documentation
• NWS OpenAPI

License

(c) 2022 Starfall. All rights reserved.

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