News items for tag geometar - Koos van den Hout

End of an era: I noticed today that the METAR for EHSB (Soesterberg) wasn't updated anymore. The last one I found:

2008/11/20 09:25
EHSB 200925Z AUTO 28014KT 9999 // 11/09 Q1010

The Soesterberg Wolfhounds were already gone but now all normal flying seems to be terminated and the meteorologist has stopped.

My first CPAN upload. I uploaded Geo::METAR 1.15 to CPAN just now. Time to find out if I did stuff right.

I created my own Geo::METAR page and the module is ready for uploading to CPAN (just some final sanity checks).

The weather keeps me interested and I have been working on processing weather data (ofcourse using Geo::METAR). Roger Burton West did a lot of work on visualizing weather data and I updated the result for Geo::METAR. Resulting maps now available on http://weather.idefix.net/. Stuff to add: caching, getting data from several sources (at least one metar for the Netherlands isn't available via the US national weather service) or using different sources.

I have taken over as maintainer of the perl Geo::METAR module for parsing METAR (Aviation routine weather report) data. Although METAR is supposed to be a strict format I find lots and lots of regional variations, newer versions, things that should not be used anymore and other things making parsing hard. I'm now using the 24-hour metar files from the National Weather Service Internet Weather Source and I use those to stresstest the METAR-parser, looking up things that make it fail completely and fixing those.