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April 23, 2008

compact weather forecast in RSS?

I'm looking for a weather forecast in RSS which packs as much information into the subject line as possible.

By point of comparison, here are a few examples of things that could be better. The weather underground's feed looks like this:
Current Conditions - 49.8F / 9.9C | Partly Cloudy - 6:50 AM EDT Apr. 23
Today as of Apr. 23 3:45 AM EDT
which is OK for current information (albeit wordy) but useless for the forecast.

I'd like something between
48104: Today: Mostly cloudy through mid morning...then becoming partly sunny. An isolated light shower during the morning...then a chance of showers and thunderstorms through 6 PM. Highs 72 to 76. Light and variable winds...becoming north 5 to 15 mph. Chance of rain 30 percent.
and
48104: Isolated Thunderstorms. High: 76 Low: 46
all to fit in the 140 character Twitter format.

Comments

While its not RSS, have you looked at text messages from the Weather Channel? If you text the area code to 42278 you get a nice forecast back. I just forwarded one to Twitter: https://twitter.com/tjameswhite

Wunder's rss seems like it used to be better. Another option might be hamweather. They have a "podcast" version which has the forecast in a single entry:

http://podcast.hamweather.net/zone/us/mi/ann%20arbor.xml

or as seperate:

http://rss.hamweather.net/zone/us/mi/ann+arbor.xml

The NWS probably has a couple pages that could be scraped as well depending on how much detail you want:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Ann+Arbor&state=MI&site=DTX&textField1=42.2754&textField2=-83.7308&e=0&TextType=1

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=Ann+Arbor&state=MI&site=DTX&textField1=42.2754&textField2=-83.7308&e=0&FcstType=digital

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