In order to keep up with current news around the NOAA Weather Wire Service, EMWIN, NOAAPort, and NOAA/NWS in general, I started following the Weather Message (a.k.a WxMessage) mailing list several years ago. It’s been a wealth of information and the members are always friendly and kind to newcomers. Due to the frustration by many of the members over recent NOAA Weather Wire outages, several WxMessage list members, (including Danny Lloyd, the owner of WxMessage) was kind enough to start sharing NWS product data using their satellite systems over the Internet. This new data source shares data in the same manner as the previously-retired EMWIN Byteblaster network. These servers provide a non-stop 24×7 feed of NWS products, including satellite graphics.
This was very exciting news to hear. Having the availability of EMWIN Byteblaster as a backup to NOAA Weather Wire will be hugely beneficial, especially during times of severe weather. Since there are EMWIN Byteblaster servers available again, I am planning on incorporating this into WxNotify. EMWIN products are also available by FTP, but there is a 2-3 minute delay between updates.
Currently, WxNotify uses NOAA Weather Wire as its primary data source, with EMWIN FTP as the back up. I plan to use the open source client npemwin from the retired noaaport.net website to replace the EMWIN FTP data source as a secondary option. I’ll then keep EMWIN FTP as a tertiary fall-back option in the case of NOAA Weather Wire and EMWIN Byteblaster goes down.
Will post another update once these changes are integrated.