Tornadocentral.com GRx placefiles

[Jeff Snyder]

I've received several emails and PMs about my 'broken' GR placefiles (apologies for not responding individually to each!). I'm aware of the problem, but with the holidays and being out of town, my time to troubleshoot and fix the placefiles has been limited. I'll attempt to get all the placefiles fixed and going again by tomorrow evening. As always, I appreciate the "hey, this is broken!" messages, since I actually didn't catch the broken placefiles until I received one such email. Not much interesting convective weather for me to pop open GR3 and notice the placefile errors starting a couple of weeks ago.

I apologize for the outtage! Better now than in the spring, I suppose. ;) Thanks!

[Jeff Snyder]

OK, problem fixed (for now) -- I had to change data sources. At any rate, if anyone notices any problems, feel free to let me know.

My mesoscale discussion placefile still has problems when it runs across a winter precip placefile, but that won't be a problem in a couple of months.

[Jeff Snyder]

OK, hopefully this will be the last post on this. I've found a new provider of the METAR data, so there shouldn't be any issues with data availability. From a programming standpoint, I've recoded the METAR placefiles to be generated on a cron schedule, so each placefile actually is only being created twice per hour. When a user, via GRx, requests a state METAR placefile, an extremely short PHP script checks to make sure the state 2-letter identifier is valid, then just includes/copies the already-created placefile. This should be much easier in terms of server resources on my end (as all METARs aren't parsed and decoded at each and every call to the placefile), and there should be zero changes on the users' end.

As a reminder, the state surface observations placefiles can be accessed at:
http://grlevel3.tornadocentral.com/metars.php?state=** where ** is the two-letter state identifier (e.g. OK, TX, etc.)

West Texas Mesonet data is available at http://grlevel3.tornadocentral.com/TXmesonet.txt . Other placefiles can be found at http://grlevel3.tornadocentral.com

[Craig Schultz]

And as a user of several of your placefiles, I would like to say "THANK YOU, JEFF!"

[Chad Cowan]

I second that. Thanks for your hard work Jeff.

[J Kinkaid]

Keep up the great work Jeff I have been using them for a couple of months now and will make a donation soon to help you cover the server bill

[Tony Perkins]

I Fourth that Jeff! I'm surprised we don't see more placefiles out there from other people, it's relatively easy to do and is extremely useful.

[Laura Hedien]

Yep! Put me down for another "thank you".
Laura <---- digging out of over a foot of the white stuff tonight

[Jason Boggs]

Another thank you from me as well. You're the man Jeff!!!