Calling Local Weather based on location

[James Scherer]

I am trying to find a way to call the local weather conditions and store them in database. We have field crews out doing painting and blasting and need to store the local temps of the area they are in. I this possible to do on the ipad 2?

[skearton]

I was also interested in doing this as well...

Any idea from the gurus?

I think you can grab gps location data now in FileMaker go, so one would think if you had that data you could find the weather related info for that location from a open sourced weather data site and import it in. Does wolfram alpha give weather data based on gps location and time?

[Vaughan]

Open source weather data? You mean, there are these weather stations around the place that just broadcast their data?

[mr_vodka]

Well one could assume that with the new Location () function it may be possible to grab the coordinates and then using an API like wunderground offers, you could grab the data and parse out the information.

http://api.wunderground.com/api/YOURAPIKEY/conditions/q/37.776289,-122.395234.json

http://api.wunderground.com/api/YOURAPIKEY/conditions/q/37.776289,-122.395234.xml

etc etc etc

[fmow]

Has anyone managed to implement this in a robust way? Any feedback or things to watch out for?

 

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Edit: As an aside what's the accuracy most of you use for the location function? Surely the less the better but it depends on what the device can do right?

[jbante]

fmow, this blog post describes what I've managed to figure out about "accuracy" and the Location functions. In summary, it's a blunt measure, it doesn't do much good to ask for smaller than 10 meters, and timeout is usually the bigger constraint in my experience.

[fmow]

Lovely, thanks man, all the best for the new year too!