[Monthly post] ba.weather administrivia [last modified: 2000-03-08 12:48:25]

[Scott Hazen Mueller]

Source of information

Ba.weather is a convenient Usenet redistribution of information
available from the "Weather Underground". If you are on the Internet
you can access WU by doing a 'telnet downwind.sprl.umich.edu 3000' (on
a UNIX system). However, if all you want is the information presented
in ba.weather, please help keep the load on downwind down by reading
the information via Usenet instead of connecting to the server
yourself.

The information on Weather Underground is purchased by the University
of Michigan Department of Atmospheric, Oceanic, and Space Sciences and
made available as a public service. The feed comes from the National
Weather Service via Zephyr Data Services. The information available on
WU is only what the NWS provides.

Timeliness and robustness:

In general, the Northern California reports are updated on WU 4 times
per day, at six-hour intervals. The ba.weather 'droid' script runs at
about 20 minutes after the expected update time every six hours and
creates the postings you see in ba.weather. These posts are then
distributed from zorch.SF-Bay.ORG.

In order to ensure that momentary communications problems don't cause
the script to miss a report, the script has built in retries for each
report. A future version of the script will be even more robust.

Each report that is posted carries an Expires: header that directs the
Usenet software to discard the article 24 hours after the posting date
and time. Also, each report is generated with a sequence number in the
Message-id: header, and a Supersedes: header is put into the header of
most reports to direct the news software to remove the previous version
of the report. In this way, the script attempts to ensure that only
the most current copy of the report is kept online.

A note to news administrators:

One of the goals of ba.weather is to keep the postings small so that
UUCP sites can afford to transfer ba.weather unbatched. This allows
UUCP sites to give ba.weather priority over other Usenet news if they
so desire.

Because this is one of the goals, I have no plans to post any graphical
or image data such as weather maps or satellite photos to ba.weather.

Using the reports:

ba.weather currently has twelve city reports and twelve specialty reports:

FAT - Clovis/Fresno
MRY - Monterey
RDD - Redding
RNO - Reno, Nevada
SAC - Sacramento
SCK - Stockton/Modesto
SJC - San Jose
SFO - San Francisco
SNS - Salinas
STS - Santa Rosa
TVL - Lake Tahoe
UKI - Ukiah
YOS - Yosemite National Park

Each of the city reports ends with a local current conditions report that
gives observations for that locale.

SF Bay Area Daily Climatological Report - rainfall and temperatures (*)
Redding, Reno and Sacramento Area Daily Climatological Reports - conditions
information for various parts of northern CA.
Coastal - Northern CA Coastal forecast - usually has storm track information
CA Weather Summary - statewide observations
Ultraviolet Light Forecast - UV levels for major US cities.

Northern and Central CA Forecast Discussion, Southern Sacramento Valley Area
Forecast Discussion, Interior Central California Area Forecast Discussion -
detailed descriptions of conditions and an explanation of the logic behind
the actual forecasts. For serious weather fans.

(*) The SF Bay Climate reports do not Supersede previous versions as there are
three different reports all under the same title.

As you can see, there is a lot of detailed information hidden in the specialty
reports, so it's worth while taking a look at them from time to time.

Other reports:

The National Weather Service in California does not provide ski
reports, and there is not a station nearer ski country than Reno,
Nevada. There are also no reports available for anywhere in Alameda
County or any of the coast areas immediately south of San Francisco,
though the Marine forecast may help for those.

The following California reports are available and not currently carried in
ba.weather:

BFL Bakersfield
BIH Bishop
BLH Blythe
BLU Blue Canyone
BUR Burbank
CEC Crescent City
DAG Daggett
EED Needles
EKA Eureka
IPL Imperial
LAX Los Angeles
MHS Mt Shasta/Yreka
MMH Mammoth Lakes
MYV Marysville
PMD Palmdale
PRB Paso Robles
S11 Alturas
SAN San Diego
SAU Saugus
SBA Santa Barbara
SMX Santa Maria
TRM Thermal
VIS Visalia
VNY Van Nuys

Address for questions and comments:

--
Scott Hazen Mueller sc...@zorch.sf-bay.org or zorch!scott
Write to weather-us...@zorch.SF-Bay.ORG to join the WU mailing list.
Maintainer of the ba.weather posting droid at 'sc...@zorch.sf-bay.org'.