Web Developers Guide
The purpose of this page is to provide documentation for those of you that wish to incorporate content found on this website to yours. This page assumes a basic understanding of web technologies. If you do have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact us. All of the applications listed below return an image. So in most cases, you will want to place the URL in an image HTML tag like so:
<img src="http://www.schoolnet8.com/insert_custom_url_here">
Determining this custom URL is the goal of the documentation below. For those of you that are impatient, here is a simple page of examples with HTML included. Again, if you have any questions, please let us know!
Hint: Know your site's ID!
Each of the participating sites in the schoolnet8.com project have been assigned a 5 character identifier by the National Weather Service. This ID is used for links on the website. To find the ID for your site, check out this page.
Applications Interfaces Documented:
1. County Zoom RADAR+SchoolNet
These are the RADAR maps shown in the left hand column on the SchoolNet8 site homepage. The default image shown on the page is pre-rendered to save processing time on the server and speed the page up. This image has temperatures and winds overlain, so if you want to plot a different variable you will need to use the dynamic plot version below.
Temperature+winds plot (fast!):
URL: http://www.schoolnet8.com/static/radar/SKCI4/SKCI4_#.png - Where SKCI4 is the site identifier you wish the image to be centered on - And # is the image age number. 0 being the newest and 9 the oldest (30 minutes)
Dynamic variable plot (slower):
URL: http://www.schoolnet8.com/GIS/apps/radar/site.php?station=SKCI4&var=myvariable - Where SKCI4 is the site identifier you wish the image to be centered on - And myvariable is the choice of tmpf - Air Temperature dwpf - Dew Point alti - Pressure sped - Wind Speed [MPH] sknt - Wind Speed [knots] barb - Wind Barb gbarb- Wind Gust Barb max_sped - Today's wind gust in MPH max_sknt - Today's wind gust in knots feel - Feels Like Temperature tmpf_max - High Temperature today tmpf_min - Low Temperature today pmonth - Rainfall this month pday - Rainfall today
2. Webcameras
Due to bandwidth restrictions, direct access to the web cameras is not available. A process runs on our server that caches a recent image and saves it on the website. Normally, this process happens every 5 minutes, but during severe weather, it will happen every minute.
The webcamera images are available in two sizes.
320x240 version: http://www.schoolnet8.com/camera/stills/
640x480 version: http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/data/camera/640x480/
If you are interested in archived webcamera images, here is a URL template to rip images from the Iowa Mesonet archive. The timestamps used here are in Greenich Mean Time (GMT/UTC).
URL: http://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/archive/data/yyyy/mm/dd/camera/NWSLI/NWSLI_yyyymmddhhmi.jpg - Where NWSLI is the ID used for the camera. It matches the id of the schoolnet8 site the camera is associated with.
3. OnAir Application
This application generates an image that looks much like the onair presentation you see on KCCI-TV. This image is handy to place on your website when you are looking for a detailed look at current conditions. There is not much dynamic about this image. The only CGI variable you need to set is the site ID.
http://www.schoolnet8.com/gen/kcci.php?station=SKCI4
4. Live Super Doppler8 App
You can directly access the maps generated from the Live Super Doppler8 App. All of the maps are generated dynamically via a call to a web application. Here is the base url you will need to use:
URL: http://www.schoolnet8.com/GIS/map.php?
The customization of this plot is done by a good number of variables
that are available to be set. This list may appear to be challenging
to comprehend, but keep in mind that they are all optional.
The processed CGI parameters are:
| Param: | Description: | Default: | Allowed Values: |
|---|---|---|---|
| radar | RADAR source. KCCI is the KCCI Super Doppler. The other ids are National Weather Service NEXRADs. If KCCI's radar is offline for some reason, the NWS radar is used. The NWS RADARs are not available in archived mode. | KCCI | KCCI, DMX, DVN, ARX, MPX, FSD, OAX, EAX |
| mode | Time mode of the map | realtime | realtime, archive |
| year | Only in archive mode, year for time setting | 2010 | 2002-2010 |
| month | Only in archive mode, month for time setting | 03 | 1-12 |
| day | Only in archive mode, day for time setting | 16 | 1-31 |
| hour | Only in archive mode, hour for time setting | 19 | 0-23 |
| minute | Only in archive mode, minute for time setting | 54 | 0-59 |
| roadcond | Show road conditions? | no | any value activates |
| sitelabel | Label sites? | no | any value activates |
| zoom | Zoom factor. 0 is no zoom | 0 | -10 thru 10 |
| width | Map image width | 640 | 120 - 1280 |
| height | Map image height | 480 | 120 - 1024 |
| extents | Map extents for the image to be drawn. This value may be adjusted by math done from clicking or zooming. Map extents are the lower left hand corner and the upper right ordered like so: minx,miny,maxx,maxy. The trick here is that the map extents are not in latitude and longitude values, but meters in the UTM Zone15 North NAD83 Projection. | 200000,4400000,710000,4900000 | ??? |
| img.x | Result of user click (x coordinate) on the map | (None) | 0 - $imgwidth |
| img.y | Result of user click (y coordinate) on the map | (None) | 0 - $imgheight |
| street | If set, string is sent to the geocoder. Ex) 100 Main Street | (None) | string |
| city | If set, string is sent to the geocoder. Do not specify the state. Only locations in Iowa work. Ex) Ames | (None) | string |
| st[] | Station ids to be plotted on the map. Defaults to KCCI's site ID. | SKCI4 | 5 character strings |
| str[] | Station ids to be removed from the st[] array. | (None) | 5 character strings |
| var | Station data plotted on map. | tmpf | tmpf, dwpf. alti, splot, sped, sknt, barb, gbarb, max_sped, max_sknt, feel, tmpf_max, tmpf_min, pmonth, pday |
| download | Return a minetype (application/octet-stream) that requires the user to save the file to disk. Default is to not do this. | (None) | any val |
That's it! Hopefully you are able to use our content on your website!