Our tax dollars at work

I've been wanting to do a project for a while that involved text messaging, an email server & weather radar images. It seems that fairly often, I'm someplace where I'd find it really handy to be able to check to the radar for impending storms, or to see how much longer a storm will be hovering over. Since I don't have a data plan for my cell phone, I'd dreamed of a way to send a text message to someplace, and have it respond back with an animated radar image. Seems simple enough, right? Well, I've got it mostly working now with some wget & .procmailrc magic. But in the process, I was trying to figure out where to get my radar images. I knew that the National Oceanic & Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) had weather forecast pages that were pretty good. After doing a little digging, I came across this link, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/ridge_download.htm that outlines just what images they have, where they live on their server, & other very useful information. Usually, it's a cat & mouse game trying to figure out where an image is, if there's time based strings in it's URL & other such nonsense. I think it's great that, as a government funded organization, we, the taxpayers, can use the information that we're ultimately paying for.

And Ryan ought to appreciate this, http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/radarfaq.htm and http://www.srh.noaa.gov/jetstream/remote/ridgeimages.htm both specifically mention color blindness and the fact that radar uses color to convey information. And they even point out a site, http://www.ryobi-sol.co.jp/visolve/en/ that has a free for personal use tool for color deficient people that can change their computer display to colors they can discern.

--JOsh