NWS - Major Changes Coming to Our Webpage on April 4th!

More on the upcoming changes some of which we already knew.

[size=83]NWS Partners,

As part of a continued effort to modernize weather.gov, the NWS is upgrading their point forecast, zone forecast, and product pages. Once these changes go live on April 4, all existing bookmarks to forecast.weather.gov will change. Links to a forecast page will display an error message that includes a URL to the new location. You will need to update your bookmarks to continue to access our forecasts quickly after the upgrade. After April 4, the new URL can also be found by searching for your location from forecast.weather.gov or www.weather.gov. These changes will not affect office pages located at www.weather.gov

If you run an automated process to get NWS data from forecast.weather.gov, you will need to switch to the new developer API by April 4. Specifications for the new API can be found here.

The primary focus of the upgrade is to make the forecast pages more reliable during weather events, but there are some new benefits of new forecast pages that include:

  • Addition of 7 day hourly forecast information to the point forecast page
  • A new mobile-friendly landing and graphical/tabular forecast page
  • Low-bandwidth optimization for all pages, on a partial roll-out at launch
  • Option to automatically detect your location on a mobile device
  • A new widget mode that allows you to customize the information on the point forecast
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http://www.wrh.noaa.gov/mtr/webchanges.php