GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 154309
Canadian forecasts and radar maps
Last modified: 2017-12-01 16:16:13 UTC
The inclusion of Canadian provinces/cities is absolutely great. I do wish, however, that forecasts and radar maps were available for them as they are for American cities. General information and URLs: -Environment Canada (http://www.weather.ec.gc.ca/) provides the "official" weather information for Canada. All news sources get their data from Environment Canada rather than use their own doppler/radar/etc stations. All pages are available in English and French (usually with a single letter change to swap languages.) -Environment Canada offers a light-weight version of their site aimed at PDAs. I assume it would be easy to strip away the little bits of padding html. The English main city-specific page is http://www.weatheroffice.pyr.ec.gc.ca/pda/citygen_e.html? Client=PDACDN_e&city=XXX where XXX is the region code (ie, YKF is the code for Kitchener-Waterloo). For the French version change citygen_e.html to citygen_f.html. -A text version of the forecast is at http://www.weatheroffice.pyr.ec.gc.ca/pda/citygen_e.html? Client=PDACDNT_e&city=XXX (same change as above to see French). -There are (poor) radar images linked off the main city-specific page. They do a check on the refer when viewing the images so that would have to be faked. -There's a better radar map at http://www.weather.ca/weather/maps/images/floods/Act_Nat_Aft.rgb.jpg; however, it shows all of Canada. I would prefer to see this map as it's more intuitive.
If you want to do up a patch, it can go in. However this sort of thing really calls for someone to start writing weather.gnome.org
I've had the same idea, and I think it will come up again and again because national weather services provide more information than what is available from the US source and it does it in the local language. For instance, Environment Canada provides a forecast, almanac, and imagery for Canadian stations (in both English and French). Also, I stumbled across an XML source that provides the data for Canada and International locations: http://weatheroffice.ec.gc.ca/scripts/forecast.pl?lang=en&type=city&display=xml&id=YOW where YOW is the 3-letter code for the Ottawa airport (substitute your city) and a 4-letter ICAO code can be used for foreign locations (e.g. KSFO for San Francisco). French data can be retrieved by setting lang=fr. The solution, as I see it, starts with putting a drop-down box on the General tab of the preferences that allows a user to choose their Weather Service Provider (e.g. NOAA, Environment Canada, Australian Bureau of Meteorology, UK Met Office, etc). From there, the program needs to have a seperate parser for each source. Perhaps a different set of tabs for each data source would be the way to go because of the different information available. I think having a local forecast displayed in the local language would be justification enough to move foreward on this. I'm interested if anybody else is: rob_johnston@sympatico.ca.
Rob, you seem quite enthusiastic! Rather then going off on a tangent in this bug report. Please have a look at the Wiki, and share your thoughts with us. We hope to make weather.gnome.org a filter between the world's insane formats and the GNOME client. This will also have the affect of reducing load on various servers around the world as 100,000 GNOME users all check their weather (moving it onto us). Check it out: http://live.gnome.org/WeatherApplet
See also http://www.weather.ca/weather/maps/satrad.htm
Moving libgweather-specific bugs out of gweather-applet
*** Bug 478584 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
A lot has changed at Environment Canada since this bug was filed. Conditions and forecast data are now provided via ATOM feeds, for example, Toronto: http://weather.gc.ca/rss/city/on-143_e.xml The terms and conditions state that the data may be used and redistributed for free, as long as Environment Canada is acknowledged as the source of the data: http://weather.gc.ca/mainmenu/disclaimer_e.html Environment Canada is much more accurate than the Norwegian data source I'm getting now, which often gets the current temperature in Toronto way wrong (eg. right now it is reporting 0°C when it is in fact more like -12°C)
The atom feed doesn't look structured enough, and in general I dislike adding region specific forecast services, but I will accept a well written patch.
If there are problems with the current sources that are used, please file bugs about the specific issues you're seeing. To add new sources, I updated the HACKING file to enumerate the requirements, and new sources should meet those. Even if feature requests are filed, they will need to contain information about all those requirements. See https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=791086 I'll close this bug as it contains nothing actionable.