I have put my Weather Chart page live, amongst the assorted other online knick-knacks in the fun section of this site. It displays the last 72 hours of temperature and rainfall data for the weather station of your choice in Australia.The data is made freely available by the Australian Bureau of Meteorology, but as their XML feeds are not expected until after the middle of 2007 I had to screen-scrape HTML for the particular aspects I required. I cache this data for 15 minutes, so the charts won't refresh faster than that.
Currently only the capital city weather is easily selectable. For other locations you have to wander through the BOM site and find the URL for the station you want. For example, to find all the stations in Western Australia, you could go via:
- WA in the top-right navigation bar, then
- Western Australian Weather and Warnings
- Western Australian Observations
- Latest Weather Observations for Western Australia
Weather Chart was designed with manual entry of URLs because I'm not sure how permanent the URLs are, and because there is no good long list of them for the program to grab. When the XML feeds come into effect I'll look at making this more user-friendly.
Update 16 Feb: Moved programming description to earlier post.