This is a project that came about when I realized that there was no way to enquire of the National Weather Service as to the estimated temperature at an arbitrary latitude and longitude within the continental US.
I had a use for such an estimate in my Astrotron project; basically, you’d like to know what the weather conditions are, or at least are likely to be, before you take the time to go out to a dark site location.
Thinking this functionality would be generally useful, I contacted the NWS, and Ron Jones, the NWS’s web manager / Internet projects person, told me in no uncertain terms that they weren’t going to create such a product.
So I did it for them, and here it is.
In the archive, you’ll find demo.py and demo.conf. You can set up demo.conf with your latitude and longitude, and it will return interpolated temperature and humidity values for that specific location by determining which NWS stations are nearest to it, and building a weighted multi-point average. As a bonus, it will also, if you have the Python PIL library installed, generate a graph (graph.gif) of the results, one of which is shown here.
Please feel free to use the project for anything you like; it’s released to the public domain. I would, of course, be delighted to hear of any changes you find worthy of making. Likewise, if and when I tweak the project, I’ll update this page.
My thanks to the people who develop PIL, it was very useful in this project.
![fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.](http://farm5.static.flickr.com/4078/4912161604_6cd46bace2_m.jpg "fyngyrz posted a photo: The map location here shows where I was when I took the photo, rather than the photo itself. I was looking west (obviously) from the north end of the church parking lot which itself is north of Bonnie Street, and south of Airport Road. I jockeyed around until I had the sun completely behind the radar housing, and then shot a few shots at different exposures, hoping that the 50D's dynamic range would catch the gradation in the sky; it did ok, but I still wish we had another couple of high quality bits of dynamic range. Maybe the next camera generation will go there. Canon EOS 50D [modified IR response in Hα range], hooded Sigma EF-S 30mm ƒ/1.4 EX DC HSM prime [ø62mm] w/B&W 62mm IR/UV cut filter #65-014691; RAW to JPEG conversion and editing in Aperture 3.")
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