Update :
Quote:

Also, I've already used a couple of gigs of bandwidth this month....I have plenty to go around, but would rather folks update their links to the KMZ from the KML as the KML accounts for about 60% of my bandwidth. I've seen an issue where some versions of the client doesn't like the KMZ (no subfolders show up), but if your's works with KMZ please switch. Again, the data in both is identical, KMZ is just compressed.

Link to KMZ

<a href="" target="_blank">Link to KML Removed</a>



This link kind of goes along with some of my previous work in this thread . I've written an app that pulls the lastest forecast tracks and predicted strength for tropical named storms (Depression, Storm, Hurricane) from the National Hurricane Center, and then writes the kml that represents the data. This link isn't as dynamic as I'd like, as the NHC only puts out a new forecast every 6 hrs or so, but it's the best I could do so far. It should be pretty cool to look at when we have a few storms roaring. I've also not tested it exhaustively, so my app may break if it encounters data outside the format that I expect. I would guess that I may run into 1 or 2 of these as the format that they provide isn't optimal for parsing. I wish they'd just put out a comma-separated list, but I guess beggars can't be choosers. The app is designed to fail gracefully though, so should it fail to write new output for some reason, the last good data should be available until the problem gets fixed.

The only thing I ask is that you not hammer my server by setting it to update every 1 second or whatever for two reasons. First, the link itself is not from home (actually on a decent server), but I'd still rather not drive up my bandwidth usage. Second, the data will only update every 6 hrs or so, so the 10 minute default refresh should do just fine. Enjoy.

[EDIT] - Forgot the screenshot. Just as I was taking the screenshot, NHC added Franklin back into the data. Kinda cool that it worked as planned.

[EDIT] - Fixed the link to the network link in the original post. Sorry about that!



Paul


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51227-TropicalWatch.kmz (22463 downloads)
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Edited by pseabury (08/27/06 07:18 PM)