New forecast data upgrade for the Météo website (#5)

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Updating the ESA Small & Medium Sized Enterprises map (#3)

Since I created the ESA contractor map in November I've been surprised to see that I seem to get regular traffic to it.

I must admit that when I built this first I was not concerned with tracking how often the underlying SME database changes on the ESA side and the project doesn't really have any built in stats tracking that (yet).

Neither have I found time to fully automate the extraction and parsing of the data from the SME database. This code to produce and prepare the background data all lives in a C# application that currently I need to run manually to get the updated lists of companies and fields.

Out of curiosity I decided to run an update on the underlying data today and was surprised at the number of new and updated entries that were located.

View Latest

The Changes

All in all there where 39 major changes to the registry including new, deleted and updated companies.

I've updated the map markers and fixed a few minor bugs relating to mobile clients.

I also introduced a change list section. This section is shown in the lower right hand corner of the map and lists the changes that I have made to the map source data.

I should do this to all of my applications actually, it is really handy to track what has changed and when.


A version of this article is also available on LinkedIn
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/esa-small-medium-sized-enterprises-interactive-map-sigmundarson

Météo France, converting between different wind speed units (#4)

The small Météo France site I created has been updated with a new parameter that can be used to customize the unit that windspeed is presented as.

The u= parameter

The new parameter that controls the windspeed is ?u= and accepts the following values:

Value	Comment	Examples
u=bf	Beaufort scale of windforce between 0 and 12. More information about conversions. Unit "F"	Try it
u=ms	Meters per second. Unit "m/s".	Try it
u=kn	Knots. Unit "kn".	Try it
u=kmh	Kilometers per hour. Unit "km/h". This is the current default.	Try it

More information on conversion and meaning of these different scales can be found here and on Wikipedia.

This parameter works both for the website as well as the weather API service.

Examples

Knots
Kn

Beaufort Force
F

Kilometers per hour
Km/h

Meters per second
m/s

Expanding the Météo weather forecast site (#3)

I've discussed the work I've done to build a simpler weather UI for the French météo service in earlier posts (first entry and second entry).

We've been having exceptionally hot weather and I decided to expand the current web app with more information that is provided by the French weather service.

Try it

Severe weather warnings

The Météo service publishes a separate list of areas that have been issued with severe weather warnings (vigilance météorologique).  I thought it might be helpful to have this information readily available to the user.

After fruitlessly attempting to scrape the HTML on this website and being unable to locate the same elements that the browser debuggers indicated were rendered. I discovered to my dismay that most of the content on these pages are being rendered by a client side JavaScript. Why, I will probably never understand as the code is quite the mess to look at.

But luckily I noticed that the whole rendering depended on a single XHR call to an external XML service that luckily didn't require any sort of CrossSite authentication. So I simply went straight to the source and saved countless hours of debugging and fiddling with bad HTML. (http://vigilance.meteofrance.com/data/NXFR33_LFPW_.xml)

Unfortunately the source doesn't really represent the data in any easily understandable way so considerable digging around in the JavaScript code was needed to fully understand all the numerical codes presented in the XML.

The raw XML data from the Météo service

The rest of the JavaScript code and HTML gave me the pieces to understand the colour coding and images to render for each risk type and severity level.

Severe gales / strong wind

While digging around and trying to figure the weather warnings out I realized that my earlier design did not account for displaying warning and windspeed numbers for any forcasted and expected wind gales. This information was already available from my earlier parsing project and needed only minimal tweaking to get correct.

This information is now presented either within the day or as a whole day event, depending on which is applicable.

The new information elements.
Click for a larger version

Try it

This article is also available on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/expanding-météo-weather-forecast-site-sverrir-sigmundarson