GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 599880
Netherlands > Utrecht Missing as Location
Last modified: 2017-12-12 01:02:14 UTC
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utrecht_%28city%29#Demographics Utrecht city had a population of 296,305 in 2007. Utrecht is a growing municipality and projections are that the city's population will surpass 350,000 by 2017 Please add this city to the list as well. Its the 5th biggest city of our tiny country.
Utrecht, in fact, is the 4th biggest city of the netherlands and has a population of 300.030 in jan 2009. I really would like to see this city added. Province Utrecht has the most important weather station (http://www.knmi.nl) of the Netherlands, in a de bilt. The knmi is only 4,3 km from the city center and is used for the utrecht weather forecasts.
A small update. I read the "Please do not:" part on the frontpage a bit later.. I checked all the entries for NL. It seems like every weather station, except Volkel, works. Volkel doesn't show any information. The rest of the weather stations are important enough, they are spread across the whole country.
Is there a specific ICAO code that we can use to get readings from this weather station? The list at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml is the one that we go by though there have been instances of weather stations that just don't show up in that list. http://www.weather.gov/tg/siteloc.shtml is a web-based interface to retrieve station codes as well.
On wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_airports_by_ICAO_code:_E#EH_-_Netherlands) I found this code: EHDB After playing with the second url, I found this: http://weather.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/nsd_lookup.pl?station=EHDB Is this all the info you needed?
That would be good (a patch to Locations.xml.in would be better), but when I enter the code at http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml I'm told that there isn't any current observation. A few years back we had all of the stations included but many of them seldom if ever provided reports. I suspect that this may have been one of the stations that was dropped during that effort. I'll try entering the code again over the next few days to see if this is an intermittent problem that just happened to be occur while we're talking about them; also see if I can find the station pruning bug to see if this was included.
Bug #166014 was the bug that removed a large number of non-reporting stations; EHDB was one of the stations that never reported during the three month period.
I found out the same. I did a bit of research and there are a few sites (Like: http://weather.gladstonefamily.net/site/EHDB) which gather the information from EHDB. It looks like they use METAR data. I contacted them, maybe they can give some more information.
I received an answer from the guy behind gladstonefamily.net: -- The data comes in a synop feed for site 06260. This is fairly widely available online. If this doesn't help the weather applet people, then they can reach out to me. Philip -- Maybe this helps? And from which sites do you collect the data.. only from noaa.gov? Or is it possible to add others as well? Maybe ehdb doesn't want to give data to a foreign organisation like noaa for some reason.
Very much so, yes! The current observations come from only from noaa.gov since that's pretty much the only URL we know about that doesn't also put restrictions on either accessing or redistributing the data. Your link eventually lead me to http://madis.noaa.gov as another possible resource; I'll have to carefully read their data use policy (http://madis.noaa.gov/data_application.html) to see if this app would be considered consistent with their intent (Dan, Vincent: any thoughts?).
The fact that they want you to provide "the name and address of the machine from which you will be logging on to the MADIS FTP or Web Services servers" suggests that they don't intend for people to publish software that other people would use that would download their data. You could ask them though...
So it is possible to gather data from other sources for certain stations? If so: I would like to have a look around for a (reliable) data source. And the format should be METAR?
libgweather is not currently set up to have multiple sources of current-weather information, though this is in large part due to the fact that we've never known of any source of freely-usable data that was better than NOAA. In theory, yes, it could get weather for some stations from different sources. (In practice, this could potentially be quite a lot of work.) The data source would need to be freely-usable, machine parseable (ideally METAR, yes, but in theory, it could be XML or something), and reliable (ie, provided by a government agency or stable commercial entity, not running on an old Pentium 90 in your closet). http://live.gnome.org/LibGWeather/ForecastsAndRadar has some pointers on what to be looking for from the perspective of forecast/radar data, but the issues are similar.
I just send the KNMI(=ehdb) an email if they have metar data available. I also asked why it's not available on noaa.gov. I hope this helps!
Created attachment 365397 [details] [review] locations: Add Utrecht No specific weather station, as the De Bilt airport METAR reporting doesn't work, so it'll likely pick up Schiphol weather instead.
Attachment 365397 [details] pushed as 5b1211a - locations: Add Utrecht