NWS Weather Story for iPhone
September 12, 2012 6:46 PM Subscribe
NWS Weather Story for iPhone
For residents of CO, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD, WI, and WY: this is a page that formats the National Weather Service Central Region's "weather story" forecast information for your iPhone, including an icon so you can it to your home screen. Information on how to customize to your location is in the extended description. Source on Github.
The National Weather Service forecast offices within the Central Region Headquarters produce a weather product called the Weather Story, which is a single-image forecast summary and brief text forecast, varying in style from office to office. For example, here is the Weather Story for the Chicago office.
This project combines that weather story with local radar information, formatted to fit an iPhone display. A favicon is included so you can add this forecast to your home screen.
To use this project, use the linked Github Pages site or place the two files on your own webserver, and then load the file in Mobile Safari, adding the site information as a URL parameter. A list of Central Region site codes is available on Wikipedia. For example, the code for Paducah, Kentucky is PAH, so you would load
Other NWS Regions may offer something similar, but the HTML file would need to be edited on Github to pull the proper source images and text forecast from those regions.
For residents of CO, IL, IN, IA, KS, KY, MI, MN, MO, NE, ND, SD, WI, and WY: this is a page that formats the National Weather Service Central Region's "weather story" forecast information for your iPhone, including an icon so you can it to your home screen. Information on how to customize to your location is in the extended description. Source on Github.
The National Weather Service forecast offices within the Central Region Headquarters produce a weather product called the Weather Story, which is a single-image forecast summary and brief text forecast, varying in style from office to office. For example, here is the Weather Story for the Chicago office.
This project combines that weather story with local radar information, formatted to fit an iPhone display. A favicon is included so you can add this forecast to your home screen.
To use this project, use the linked Github Pages site or place the two files on your own webserver, and then load the file in Mobile Safari, adding the site information as a URL parameter. A list of Central Region site codes is available on Wikipedia. For example, the code for Paducah, Kentucky is PAH, so you would load
index.html?site=PAH. The default site code is LOT, which should be the site with the greatest number of residents in the Central Region.Other NWS Regions may offer something similar, but the HTML file would need to be edited on Github to pull the proper source images and text forecast from those regions.
Role: Creator
I made some edits recently which should be big improvements.
In the middle of a big storm, the NWS might also put out a "Nowcast" with another image and more text to give an overview of the storm. This page now automatically loads that extra text and indicates that you can tap on the Weather Story image to load the Nowcast image.
I also updated the radar info — some weather stations use a different station code for their radar. Every station in the NWS central region should now be accurate. You can also tap on the local radar to toggle the regional radar view. Some stations (e.g. St. Louis and La Crosse) are sort of on the line between regional views so this might not be as helpful for them.
This is now my favorite iPhone weather app, despite not even giving the current temperature — I use the drop-down notifications area to check that. If the other NWS regions put out Weather Story images too, I would probably try to make a legitimate app out of this that could display proper (non-monospaced) text and everything. Maybe someday.
posted by stopgap at 1:58 PM on March 5, 2013
In the middle of a big storm, the NWS might also put out a "Nowcast" with another image and more text to give an overview of the storm. This page now automatically loads that extra text and indicates that you can tap on the Weather Story image to load the Nowcast image.
I also updated the radar info — some weather stations use a different station code for their radar. Every station in the NWS central region should now be accurate. You can also tap on the local radar to toggle the regional radar view. Some stations (e.g. St. Louis and La Crosse) are sort of on the line between regional views so this might not be as helpful for them.
This is now my favorite iPhone weather app, despite not even giving the current temperature — I use the drop-down notifications area to check that. If the other NWS regions put out Weather Story images too, I would probably try to make a legitimate app out of this that could display proper (non-monospaced) text and everything. Maybe someday.
posted by stopgap at 1:58 PM on March 5, 2013
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