NWS use of RSS Robert Bunge OCIO 2/21/06

Early Use of RSS at NWS ● First RSS feed – NWS “headlines” published Dec 12, 2002 – New look and feel had a head line teaser section on NWS homepage; – Traditional updates kept corrupting the page; – Midnight exchange with a NWS IT in Great Fall, MT pointed us to RSS; – Realized it was ideal for weather watch/warning information

Early RSS at NWS ● Headline teaser feed created to get feet wet ● Used to update homepage headline without having to actually edit the html, and allow others use the information w/o screen scraping ● Worked great but: – always fat fingered the date published with vi so the feed would not validate!

Watch/warnings ● Weather watch and warning statements are nothing less than news headlines ● First were feeds for states/territories – Updated every 1-2 minutes – Quite popular, but users wanted finer detail – counties or zip codes – In addition to RSS, also generate HTML and CAP XML (Common Alerting Protocol) ● Ideal for customers who wanted to put NWS alerts on their web pages

Hurricane/Severe Storms ● National Hurricane Center started feeds in 2004 – Feed listed active products – maps, forecasts, etc ● Storm Prediction Center – Watches and discussions ● 2005: NHC feed by storm – Integrated into weather.gov homepage – Automatic updates (yeah!)

Enhanced Watch/warning feeds ● Alert feeds for NWS forecast zones – Forecast zone similar to counties ● 1,800 feeds updated every 1-2 minutes! – Technical challenge – Dynamic, server loading concerns ● million downloads per month

Current Observations ● Lots of requests for current weather; ● Traditional format, METAR, not very easy to parse; ● RSS feed easy to put current weather on a web page or on a desk top via any common RSS reader;

Questions? Robert Bunge NOAA/NWS OCIO x140