New Plugin – Antarctica

New Plugin – Antarctica

Hi guys,

I am slowly mentally getting ready for my least favorite season – the summer and looking forward to fall when it starts getting cold again (though I have to say there is a cold front coming tomorrow with even snow possible 🙂

I therefore thought I need to make a plugin for the summer – and so I decided to make a plugin with current conditions from the automated weather stations in Antarctica – so that I at least have something to look at which will remind me of winter during the uncomfortable warm, sunny days.

What seemed a relatively easy task turned out very complicated because I found that both Google maps and Leaflet maps are useless. Just try entering some of the GPS in Google maps and you will most likely end up with a marker in the middle of the ocean – this is due to the Mercator projection which is used by all these map APIs and which works ideal for most locations – but not Antarctica.

I therefore had to use different ways to show the correct map of Antarctica, but I think it works now.

Data is (or rather should be) updated ever hour – HOWEVER – as you can probably imagine, many stations often fail to report so the number of stations is likely to vary. Right now there is around 15, yesterday there was over 40 when I was creating this. The plugin will always load whatever is currently available and display it.

Data includes:

  • temperature
  • humidity
  • pressure
  • wind speed

Data is shown on an interactive map as well as in a sortable table, clicking the item in the table will show you that station on the map.

DEMO

Enjoy!

7 thoughts on “New Plugin – Antarctica”

    • Only possibility would be trying to find an alternative source, I will see what is possible. But using yr.no would be dangerous. It would violate their policies and what could result is a lifetime block of your server IP so you would not be able to use anything that uses yrno (forecast block, meteogram etc.).

    • Hi,
      ok, , the problem is as I said that yrno does not let you download more than one station at once, so it is only used for blocks with forecast for example, where we always load just one location – your location.
      Yes there is a block for SE and FI, but thats using their national NWS and not yr.no, which for this purpose is unusable.

    • LOL… not much related to this plugin 😀

      Unfortunately this is not possible because yr.no has its API, which is what you have to use (not scraping data from the site you sent). That would violate the copyright. And the API only lets you download conditions for one location at a time, so I use it for forecast etc. but it cannot be used to load data from many stations.

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