Weather Warnings in CAP Format and Deutscher Wetterdienst (DWD)

[Karen K]

Some month ago I wrote two little scripts to process the warning alerts provided by the german weather agency Deutscher Wetterdienst.

I wondered why sometimes there are 2 warnings for the same kind of event. They had a little bit different start and end time, but the time period was overlapping. So I asked them how that happens, and I got an answer. They provide different warnings files for different areal resolutions. And I learnt, the higher resolution is available in CAP file format, only. As I understood it, it is an international file format for weather alerts.

So I started to read through the lengthy documentation. And I wrote another script called "dwd-cap-warnings", that can be used as a replacement instead of "dwd-warnings". It downloads the CAP files provided by Deutscher Wetterdienst and creates HTML include files to use in skins as well es JSON files to process by Javascript. It knows some options to change the behavior.

And so you can get the alerts for a single town or village now: weewx-DWD

Additionally I found out where to download a list of the names and codes the DWD uses: cap_warncellids.csv