RSS and Weather

[WA5ZNU]

I read this interesting note today. I know that APRS is often used for WX reporting as well. This summary comes from XML.org Daily Newslink. Thursday, 30 September 2004 by Robin Cover of http://oasis-open.org

Rain Day XML
John E. Simpson, XML.com

Depending on how you count, we had somewhere between three and five
named tropical storms and hurricanes pummel our [U.S.] coastline and
interior. We knew in advance the storms were coming, of course. We just
didn't know when or exactly where. The ideal solution to these
difficulties would give you targeted information, preferably down to
the level of city (if not ZIP or other postal code within a city). The
author surveys XML solutions to the weather-forecasting problem: Simple
RSS feeds, data from the U.S. National Weather Service (NWS), data from
The Weather Channel itself, weather alerts. A potential source format
for this information is the Common Alerting Protocol (CAP) published
by OASIS. Note, though, that CAP is a generic "public alert" protocol;
alerts can cover not just meteorological events, but also geological,
national security, and so on. One problem with any of the solutions
discussed is that getting the weather update still depends on
electrical power (battery or generator), if necessary -- in order to
access an ISP. Maybe the most elegant fix to this final dilemma would
be the ability to receive XML-based updates via a cell phone or
similar device. Whenever we lost power, we were still connected to
the outside world by cell phone. A nifty demonstration of the
possibilities is provided at the CapeScience web site. This approach
makes use of the CapeScience AirportWeather or GlobalWeather Web
service to return to the client a SOAP response suitable for display
on the target medium.

http://www.xml.com/pub/a/2004/09/29/weather.html