Weather XML, the new frontier?

May 18, 2004

Today my quest has been to find some standards for disseminating weather
data over the web. My initial reaction is, of course, that RSS would be a perfect fit!
Technically we’d need to extend RSS to handle the weather data in XML format, but the basis is
there. We just need to receive the weather anytime a sensor changes and display it to the
user.



The National Weather Service
along with NOAA (National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Administration) have put up an “Experimental” XML site. From here I can
grab an RSS 2.0 feed or a CAP
(Common Alerting Protocol) feed. Now CAP is interesting because it was very recently approved
by OASIS as a standard.



To my point… CAP seems to be a great standard for Weather Alerts, but what about
normal weather data? If I just want to know the wind speed / temp / humidity / etc, then
where’s the Weather XML standard? I found a couple posts about WeatherML but that was from
2000 and looked abandoned. I’d like our sensors to output a standard markup, but only if we
can find one. We just might have to right our own schema for this. Any ideas?