======================================================
 Frequently Asked Questions About the Weather Utility
======================================================

:Copyright: (c) 2006-2024 Jeremy Stanley <fungi@yuggoth.org>. Permission
            to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software is
            granted under terms provided in the LICENSE file distributed
            with this software.

.. contents::

1. Can I help?
--------------
Sure! Bug reports and feature suggestions are always welcome, but fixes
and patches are of course preferred. Contact fungi@yuggoth.org if
desired, but please read this FAQ and the included manuals for
weather(1) and weatherrc(5) before asking questions that might be
answered therein.

2. How do I figure out my local METAR station ID?
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The list of stations included in the "stations" file is comprised of
thousands of entries, so if you're within the USA it's recommended to
use weather's built-in Census place name and ZCTA (postal ZIP code)
searching capabilities. Otherwise, using its latitude,longitude
coordinate search feature is probably your best bet. See the weather(1)
manual for examples.

3. How do I figure out my local city name and state abbreviation?
-----------------------------------------------------------------
As of the 2.0 release, this is no longer necessary. In Spring of 2011
the NWS switched away from city-named forecast zone IDs to the numeric
state zone IDs also used for alerts. As a result, weather now comes with
pregenerated correlations between airports/stations and zones along with
USA Census (FIPS and ZCTA/ZIP code) and global latitude,longitude
coordinates and can search among them in a flexible and intuitive
manner. See the weather(1) manual for examples.

4. I live outside the USA--can this be made to work for me anyway?
------------------------------------------------------------------
ICAO codes for METAR stations can be found for cities and airports
worldwide, but forecast and alert data is harder to come by. If you have
any recommendations of plaintext data for other countries available in a
format like NOAA's, I will be happy to start incorporating it into the
weather utility. If the data is published in a non-English language,
I'll require some additional input from speakers of that language for
how to handle filtering and formatting of the text.

5. Why do I get the wrong forecast when specifying -i or --id?
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As of the 2.0 release, this question is no longer relevant.

6. Where can I get a list of the NWS advisory zones for alerts?
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As of the 2.0 release, this is no longer necessary. See FAQ entries #2
and #3 for more detail.

7. What values are valid for a --headers list?
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The default set it uses if you don't override it yourself on the command
line or in configuration is as follows::

  heat_index
  precipitation_last_hour
  relative_humidity
  sky_conditions
  temperature
  weather
  wind
  windchill

These are a case-insensitive match against the start of lines in a
decoded METAR up to the first colon (:) with spaces optionally replaced
by underscores (_). You can see the full METAR for a given condition
report by passing --verbose or by observing one directly (perhaps by
looking in your *datacache* directory). Unfortunately I haven't found
any proper specification for the decoded METAR format used by the NWS so
know of no comprehensive list of what lines might appear.
