Problem with NOAA forecasts

I would say its simply that the noaa server is overloaded, with everyone checking it, because of the severe and widespread winter weather pattern occuring, yes?

Without a doubt, they took down parts of their site like the “printable forecasts” which messes up everybody.

Mine down as well…

I went to my local NWS forecast page and they’ve removed the entire “printable forecast” links!!

On their “Forecast Discussion” page this morning…

AREA FORECAST DISCUSSION…UPDATED
NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE UPTON NY
610 AM EST WED FEB 14 2007

.EQUIPMENT…
ATTENTION ALL USERS…POINT AND CLICK FORECASTS ON THE NWS UPTON
WEBPAGE ARE NOT UPDATING AT THIS TIME. OUR REGIONAL HQ HAS BEEN
NOTIFIED AND WILL BE WORKING ON THE PROBLEM. THIS PROBLEM
APPEARS TO BE AFFECTING NEIGHBORING WFOS INCLUDING BOX/ALY/BGM/PHI
AT THIS TIME. USERS CAN FIND UPDATED WEATHER INFORMATION BY CLICKING
ON THE /LOCAL WEATHER/ LINK ON THE LEFT HAND SIDE OF THE MAIN WFO
UPTON HOMEPAGE…THEN SELECTING THE TEXT PRODUCT OF INTEREST. THE
LATEST ZONE FORECAST PRODUCT CAN BE FOUND BY SELECTING THE INDICATED
LINK BELOW THE POINT AND CLICK MAP.

Here is what i have been seeing:
If you goto your NWS page for your area as for here it is http://www.erh.noaa.gov/ctp/ and you click on the map it redirects you to http://www.crh.noaa.gov/zones/PAZ024.php?zo=1 but of course it is not showing the city names only the counties. which is the Central Region Headquarters is where they have everone hitting.

I have noticed a change in the use of the weather icons also - now the POP is listed underneath, where before the POP was part of the icon image…

Stan,

If you notice on the NWS site, when you type in your zip code (or city/state), it redirects you to the crh.noaa.gov site, rather than the erh.noaa.gov site. This is probably the reason for the POP listed underneath.

–Tim

Hmmm… I thought that WRH was the only NOAA site to use the “PoP underneath” setup … (that’s why I’d created the forecast script for WRH), and the other NOAA sites used the PoP-stamped icons. I hope they aren’t propagating the somewhat older WRH method to the other regions. If so, then my WRH script may work with them too. I’ll do a bit of looking around and see what’s up with the rest of the NOAA regions.

Very strange.

Ken

Here’s the result of my cursory tests:

WRH site… unchanged – my WRH forecast script still works
ERH site … now refers to CRH site for printable forecasts, and CRH site has PoP underneath (not on icons) and uses /HW3php/images/fcicons for image directory
CRH site … looks unchanged for original CRH states (Carter Lake, IA looks ok).
SRH site … looks unchanged. Has PoP on Icons
ARH site … offers text forecast only, Query on Weather.gov for Nome, AK goes to SRH site for forecast/icons
PRH site … Query on Weather.gov for Hilo, HI goes to SRH site for forecast/icons.

So… looks like Eastern region forecasts are now (temporarily?) directed to CRH site which has new image directory and unstamped icons for those referrals from ERH.

I wonder what’s up with ERH, and why the requests for forecasts are directed to the CRH site instead.

Sterling, Va. NWS office located in Eastern Region Headquarters has the following statement at the top of the page:

*Problems with the Point-And-Click? Please use our Zone Forecast Product instead. Thank you for your patience!
http://www.erh.noaa.gov/er/lwx/

This is good news that its an issue that they are working on…

For all the carterlake advforecast.php script users that have point-printable forecasts using URLs to www.erh.noaa.gov (and are now broken because of the redirect to www.crh.noaa.gov), there is now a script to tide you over until ERH comes back with printable point forecasts.

Script is at http://saratoga-weather.org/advforecast2-erh2crh.php?sce=view

See it working (for Steve’s Kent County URL) at http://saratoga-weather.org/advforecast2-erh2crh.php

To implement,

  1. copy out your old Point-printable forecast URL from your current source into your browser
  2. visit the page (it will end up on a www.crh.noaa.gov page)
  3. copy THAT url into the source as $fileName.

Since NOAA is doing double redirects (erh->crh url, crh url->second crh url), we need the browser to sort out the final destination URL for the Area Forecast (for the county), as fetchUrlWithoutHanging doesn’t follow 302 redirects.

Rename your old advforecast.php script (you’ll eventually be able to use it).
Upload the new script (with the URL replaced) as advforecast.php
It will use your ‘forecast.txt’ file for caching.

Access your new script with a ?force=1 to load the cache with the new contents. You should then see a forecast for your county, PoPed Icons and all.

Best regards,
Ken

Hmmm, kinda strange looking, but it does work!

http://www.branfordfire.com/weather/wx2.php

Thanks, Ken

Thanks Ken for using me as the example, it made it real easy for me to add the fix. As FIREWALL is suggesting, we do have an alignment problem with the icons and text…do u have asuggestion on a fix for that? Also what is controlling the overall size? http://www.belcak.com/nwsforecast.html u can see my img src approach is scrolling left to right…can it be the problem with icon alignment…

Thanks for your help…

Steve

Oops :oops: #-o … I’d left a bit of debugging code in it that printed HTML comments on the page before the DOCTYPE, so the browser went into quirks mode and ignored the style directive in the body statement.

All fixed now … should look the same as the carterlake advforecast now.

Ken

OK Ken thanks for all your help…dumb question!!! Is the revised script the same file name and location as posted here http://saratoga-weather.org/advforecast2-erh2crh.php?sce=view - I thought I got the new version, made the changes as needed but when I checked my page is still the same as it was.

What am I missing?

Thanks Again

Steve, I just looked at your page (and did a view source inside the IFRAME, and it looks as it should (no comments before the DOCTYPE). I see it formatted without the big clunky font for the text forecast and headings.

What is it that still seems strange?

Ken

Alignment of icon and text…see attached jpg


Yea i see the same thing he is seeing here also. this is just running the script without it even being inside a page it looks like his.

After Following Ktrue directions,
For some reason, I can’t get mine to work at all:

http://69.143.144.53/advforecast_php.php
http://69.143.144.53/forecast.txt

Anyone have any ideas?

Regards,
Michael