Hi guys,
I updated the Weather METAR plugin.
It now includes something I have always wanted to achieve but it was problematic. What it is is simply loading and viewing current data for the whole world at once. Technically it is a problem mostly because of loading time. If you have several thousand stations you cannot load each one separately.
Finally I found a way. This new page loads raw METAR data directly from the NOAA ftp. Then it processes it and views it in an interactive map, just like it does for the country page (which is still included). You can filter out and visualize and color-code stations by temperature, humidity, wind speed, pressure, distance from station, sort the data etc. You can view day/night, and in this new page you even see cloud layers and weather conditions and local time.
There are of course certain disadvantages as well. First of all – this is as I said, raw data and so not all stations are always available. The data is updated once every hour. When the cache is refreshed it might take about 10s before it is finished. Also keep in mind that when viewing the entire world, it will take time – this is not because of the server but will depend on how powerful your PC is – it needs to render several thousand of points in the table and on the map, which obviously takes up quite some resources.
You can view data by countries, continents, the whole world, certain radius from your station etc.
Tables can be sorted so you can find the currently coldest/warmest place on Earth (from the data available of course), windiest and much more. Also, once the cache is refreshed, all countries, continents etc. will load instantly (depending on computer power) because the cache includes the whole world.
There is definitely lot of potential for future additions and I already have several ideas how to improve this.
In addition this update includes some minor bug fixes and tweaks.
Enjoy