Meteoalarm Weather Warnings PHP WebService

Accurate, localised weather warnings are a useful addition to any weather website. Historically I have used Wunderground’s Alerts API for this purpose on my own weather website. However, at some point last year Wunderground’s Alerts API stopped returning any weather warnings for the UK even during major weather events. At the time of writing this is still the case.

I noted that Wunderground were receiving their European weather warning data from Meteoalarm. Looking at their website I found that weather warnings from the UK were being reported accurately matching exactly what the UK MetOffice (the source of Meteoalarm’s UK data) were publishing on any given day.

To my disappointment neither Meteoalarm nor the MetOffice published a webservice API for weather warnings. Meteoalarm do, however, provide RSS feeds of weather warnings for each country and region in Europe that they support.

I decided to use Meteoalarm’s RSS feeds to solve my own issue with publishing weather warnings to my website for my local area. However, I knew that directly publishing raw RSS feeds would not be not flexible enough for my needs. I would instead prefer a RESTful JSON formatted web service API which I could call via AJAX.

To this end I’ve written meteo-alarm-weather-warnings. This is a PHP API available on GitHub under the MIT License. It’s primary use case is to make it easy to incorporate the latest MeteoAlarm weather warnings into a web site while not requiring users to directly engage with the underlying RSS feeds. The web service fetches the appropriate RSS feed for a given request and parses and converts it into a consistent JSON formatted reply.

It’s functionality includes:

1. The ability to query for all weather warnings for all regions within any European country covered by Meteoalarm for today and tomorrow.
2. The ability to query for weather warnings for any individual region for today and tomorrow.
3. Custom date/time formats to use for results.
4. Custom time zone to use for date/times in results (Meteoalarm reports all date/times in CET).

For example, here is a portion of the the raw JSON results from meteo-alarm-weather-warnings for the UK on 31/Dec/2017 when several warnings were in effect:

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meteo-alarm-weather-warnings is now incorporated into my own weather web site’s weather warnings page. Here is how it looked rendering results from the web service for my local area on 31/Dec/2017:

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Met Office Weather Maps PHP API

For those who want to add detailed weather maps of the UK to their websites an excellent option is to use the Met Office’s DataPoint web service API. Among many other features the API makes available several different types of observation and forecast time series weather maps as detailed images.

However, DataPoint still leaves users with a lot of work to do if they want to utilise the maps on their websites. For example the DataPoint API only provides the map images as simple layers with no underlying map of the UK. This gives users the flexibility of adding their own UK maps but creates one of many common problems that all DataPoint users have to solve individually.

To address this and other website integration issues I’ve made the met-office-weather-maps PHP API available on GitHub under the MIT License. It’s primary use case is to make it easier to incorporate the latest Met Office weather maps into a web site while not requiring users to directly engage with the Datapoint API.

It’s functionality includes:

1. Wrapping the complexity of underlying JSON web service calls by exposing one simple PHP class for each available map type.
2. Adding tailored UK map layers to fetched images that obey the required Mercator projection boundary box.
3. Adding UK timestamps to map images where they are not already present.
4. Operating caching to allow maps to be requested on a regular schedule. This ensures that the latest maps are fetched without making excessive calls to DataPoint which may breach their fair use agreement.

The met-office-weather-maps API supports all of the DataPoint map types:

• Infrared satellite
• Lightning strikes
• Precipitation forecast
• Pressure forecast
• Rainfall radar
• Surface pressure charts
• Temperature forecast
• Total cloud cover forecast
• Total cloud cover and precipitation forecast
• Visible satellite

See the met-office-weather-maps Git Hub project page for details of its requirements, installation and API documentation.

I originally wrote met-office-weather-maps for incorporation into my own weather website where I regularly fetch a selection of weather maps. I previously used Weather Underground’s map API but I find DataPoint to be far superior in terms of map selection and the high frequency of map update.

See below for some real examples that demonstrate met-office-weather-map’s capabilities.

Example 1: Surface Pressure Forecast Map

The Surface Pressure Forecast image available from DataPoint is a transparent layer depicting isobars and fronts:

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The same image after processing by met-office-weather-maps. Note the addition of a timestamp and a colour base image of the UK:

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Example 2: Visible Satellite Map

The Visible Satellite image available from DataPoint is an opaque layer depicting cloud cover:

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The same image after processing by met-office-weather-maps. Note the addition of a yellow outline overlay image of the UK which does not obscure the existing image layer’s timestamp and key:

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Example 3: Temperature Forecast Map

The Temperature Forecast image available from DataPoint is a partially transparent layer depicting colour-coded screen temperature:

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The same image after processing by met-office-weather-maps. Note the addition of a timestamp, a colour base image and a black outline overlay image of the UK:

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Example 4: Cloud Cover and Precipitation Forecast Map

The Cloud Cover and Precipitation Forecast image available from DataPoint is a transparent layer depicting cloud cover and colour-coded precipitation rates:

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The same image after processing by met-office-weather-maps. Note the addition of a timestamp, a colour base image and a black outline overlay image of the UK:

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JSON Web Service for Weather Display Live

I’ve been busy implementing a new website for my weather station over the last few weeks at Wayne’s Weather.

There are a number of new technologies being employed. I’ve ditched my bespoke (and ugly) HTML and instead use Bootstrap for a client responsive UI. Chart and image viewing is now more user-friendly thanks to Lightbox. I have also made extensive use of JQuery to pull in information from various sources and to provide a more dynamic experience.

The functionality of the site has also been extended. There are now more in-depth current readings supporting both metric and imperial measurements, forecasts and weather maps from Wunderground.com for the local area have been integrated and I have added a weather webcam and a weather almanac. I intend to write posts to cover the wunderground and webcam build outs soon.

For now this post will concentrate on an unexpected off-shoot of my efforts: a Web Service that exposes Weather Display Live data.

Weather Display Live

Weather Display (and its equivalents such as MeteoHub) can generate clientraw.txt files containing a weather station’s readings and can upload them to a web server periodically and frequently via FTP (in some cases every minute). The primary purpose of this is to drive a Weather Display Live (WDL) dashboard:

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The WDL clientraw.txt format is well documented and I have previously used the HTTP addressable clientraw.txt to drive a custom Android widget and my PiFaceCAD Weather Display Console. The disappointing aspect is WDL itself. Don’t get me wrong it’s an excellent weather dashboard and I still have it available in my new website. The problem with it is that is Flash based which is not as widely supported as it used to be. It’s pretty much not an option for mobile device clients running IOS or Android, for example.

To counter this I wanted my new website to make far greater use of the information contained in the clientraw.txt files outside of WDL dashboard itself. My old weather website made use of PHP to grab weather readings from clientraw.txt and place them into web pages before serving them up to the client. This was an approach I wanted to move away from.

I’d just cut my teeth on using JSON formatted web services with my experience as a client to the Wunderground API. I liked the idea of having a page load its own data from the client side where it could conceivably be mix and match data from various services. I figured it wouldn’t be too difficult to create my own web services to expose WDL data and call them from my own web site.

json-webservice-wdlive

I settled on using PHP for the implementation for a couple of reasons. Firstly because I’ve used it for server-side processing on-and-off for a few years and know if fairly well. Secondly because I intended to write a general solution which I could open source for others to use and PHP is ubiquitous in the hosting world.

The result was json-webservice-wdlive, a JSON formatted web service API.

The API exposes two URLs. The first URL returns current weather conditions including Temperature, Pressure, Rainfall, Wind, Humidity, Dew Point, Wind Chill, Humidex, Heat Index and UV. The second URL returns a weather almanac for Month-to-Date, Year-to-Date and All Time records. Both JSON and JSONP (enabled with the addition of a callback attribute to the URL) are supported.

Besides exposing the data in the default units found in clientraw the responses also contain many alternative units. For example, clientraw files store wind speeds in knots. The Web Service responses, on the other hand, respond with Bft, knots, km/h, mph, and m/s.

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Note that I only expose the data I need for my own purposes (i.e. what my weather station setup supports). However, it would be a simply matter to expand the service calls to add, say, solar measurements or extend the selection of almanac measurements. Anything else WDL clientraw.txt files provide can be exposed, if required, with minor code additions.

I have made the json-webservice-wdlive source code available as a GitHub project. Have a look in the project’s README for installation instructions. json-webservice-wdlive is also running live on my own weather website. You can try it at by clicking on the links below:

• Current Weather
  http://www.waynedgrant.com/weather/api/weather.json
• Weather Almanac
  http://www.waynedgrant.com/weather/api/almanac.json

Refer to the GitHub project page for more details on the Web Service’s response fields including the different measurement units and number field formatting details.

I also make use of the service in three places on my own website: the Current Conditions, Weather Almanac (pictured below) and the Forecast page where I mix my service’s results with those from the Wunderground web service.

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If you have a WDL enabled website feel free to install json-webservice-wdlive to expose your weather data to others and/or to include your information in your own pages.