Gnome Weather Applet Stranded
The Gnome weather report applet has ceased working on CentOS5/6. http://weather.noaa.gov/ says “This service is no longer available”. Are there any good alternatives? I liked the applet as it allowed the use of a custom radar map.
As I just discovered, the weather functionality of the CentOS6 Gnome clock applet was using the same service.
21 thoughts on - Gnome Weather Applet Stranded
Hm, this is bad. I was relying on this feature heavily. Let’s see if there is a fix. I don’t imagine RH will care about this on EL6, but maybe MATE guys could help.
Nux! writes:
The code for the respective applets is quite different. Mate uses weather.com, but I bet the API is different and a fix requires actual coding.
isdtor wrote:
“Smaller” government, Cut taxes (for the rich). Make people pay for what they’re already paying taxes to support….
Had you gone to noaa.gov, and clicked on climate, it appears that they want to now charge you $3/yr for the service.
mark
It would be good to have someone sue US government for that. According to US law, everything paid for by taxpayer’s money should be freely accessible by everybody (including non-US entities). Compare, e.g., with GPS.
Valeri
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Valeri Galtsev Sr System Administrator Department of Astronomy and Astrophysics Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics University of Chicago Phone: 773-702-4247
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The data is still there for free. The National Weather Service sent out a message several months ago that http://weather.noaa.gov and the data on that site would be shut down due to server consolidaton.
Here’s the official announcement, and where the data is available now:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/notification/scn16-16wngccb.htm
Gilbert
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Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: gilbert@niu.edu ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/NIU_Weather **
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/niu.weather *
*******************************************************************************
That’s server consolidation (sorry for not spell checking), and the data you may want is specifically here:
ftp://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/
*******************************************************************************
Gilbert Sebenste ********
(My opinions only!) ******
Staff Meteorologist, Northern Illinois University ****
E-mail: gilbert@niu.edu ***
web: http://weather.admin.niu.edu **
Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/NIU_Weather **
Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/niu.weather *
*******************************************************************************
The MATE clock applet’s “show weather” function has quit on my desktops as of sometime yesterday. And the stand-alone weather applet doesn’t work at all, either.
I was wondering why that had happened.
It looks like it was quickly fixed in MATE, hope EPEL moves fast… :)
https://github.com/mate-desktop/libmateweather/issues/30#issuecomment-242190096
I’m getting DNS not found errors from anything in NOAA.GOV.
anyways, ‘climate’ refers to historical averages by location/month/week/date. presumably the API involved here was for current weather conditions and forecast.
flushed my dns cache, now its working, whack.
wait, that noaa.gov $3/person is saying thats what the National Weather service costs to provide annually. its not a fee.
anyways, here’s the bulletin saying the old weather.noaa.gov web api is discontinued http://www.nws.noaa.gov/om/notification/scn16-16wngccb.htm
the raw data is now distributed here, http://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/
actually, this sort of raw data is probably more parsable.
http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mesowest/getobextXml.php?sid=KSFO&numH
or, the microcast for a specific lat/long, http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat6.9733&lon=-122.0358&FcstType=digitalDWML
(whihc is this page in XML format http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat6.9733&lon=-122.0358&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=digital
)
Just for grins, I’ve been looking through the sources for the version I’m running that does not contain the fix. Either I”m blind, or there’s a whole lot of obscurity built in there. I cannot, for the life of me, find where it hides the URL it goes to to get the weather data. Since there ought to be a fix coming down the pipe Real Soon Now, I won’t sorry about it, but it woulda been nice if I coulda figured it out. :(
Fred,
Check here https://git.gnome.org/browse/libgweather/tree/libgweather/weather-metar.c?h=gnome-2-30
I’ve rebuilt libmateweather for EL7 with the aforementioned patch and it seems to have fixed the issue. Feel free to use it until EPEL package the fix.
http://li.nux.ro/download/nux//tmp/libmateweather7/
I’ve patched libgweather with the same MATE patch and it seems to be working fine. Give it a try http://li.nux.ro/download/nux/tmp/libgweather6/
Thanks Nux, works just fine on CentOS 6.8
thanks Nux!
I installed it and it now gets current conditions just fine.
but I tried several different locations and all of them say that there is no forecast available. Possible coincidence??
Fred
Fred Smith writes:
The patch is incomplete. The Mate guys didn’t patch this file. Run tcpdump and verify it’s trying query http://www.weather.gov/forecasts.
# pwd
/root/rpmbuild/SOURCES/libgweather-2.28.0/libgweather
# grep http * |grep forecast weather-iwin.c: /* see the description here: http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/ */
weather-iwin.c: url = g_strdup_printf (“http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/sample_products/browser_interface/ndfdBrowserClientByDay.php?&lat=%.02f&lon=%.02f&format$+hourly&startDate=%04d-%02d-%02d&numDays=7”, weather-iwin.c: url = g_strdup_printf (“http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/zone/%s/%s.txt”, state, zone);
[root@torr libgweather]#
Sorry, I meant http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/forecasts/… .
Hi, NOAA moved the url on which you can get the data. I use clweather, a little command-line util, I just change the URL in the sourcecode and it worked again. The move happen a couple of weeks ago. The new URL to point the application to is:
http://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/observations/metar/decoded/
Good luck & 73,
Adrian
Thanks, I’ll raise the issue