Retrieve, view, store and map METAR meterological information.

METAR data are routine weather reports provided at fixed intervals. This is a minimal program to scrape the most recent METAR information for a set of user-defined stations (or all of them), store it in a SQLite/Spatialite database for posterity, and display the most recent reports on a Leaflet map.

Live demo.

One can use the standalone Linux GUI, or execute the source code.

For the former, at the commandline enter the following: $ ./metarvis-1.0/metarvis-gui for the graphical version, and $ ./metarvis-1.0/main for the automatic version (which has constrained stations to retrieve data from).

For the latter option, you can execute $ python source/main.py to execute main.py for a non-GUI option (tweak the paramets in main.py's main() method if you want different stations). You can also still run the GUI without the standalone application with $ python source/metarvis-gui. This may be useful if you want to extend the GUI with some new functionality. See below for instructions about then making a new executable with the adjusted source code.

If opting for the standalone executable, it's a standalone executable for a reason. You just have to run it! At the command line from the METAR-vis directory, ./metarvis-1.0/metarvis-gui will set it going.

Of course, if not opting for the standalone GUI, you must also install dependencies, which are listed in requirements.txt. With Python 2.7, You should be able to get away with doing pip install pyspatialite and pip install folium (and possibly also pip install easygui if you also want the GUI), although these have their own dependcies (including numpy and pandas) which may not be resolved. That's why the standalone executable could be useful.

If you make changes to the source and then want to make a new standalone version, best of luck. It actually took twice as long to make this executable than it did to write the actual program.

Still if you want to try, I used bbFreeze to make one on Linux. (pip install bbfreeze.) This largely requires that you appropriately edit setup.py, and then run $ python setup.py.

After setup.py has created the executable in its directory, there is still work to be done. Just running the executable without this work leads to an error with Jinja2 being unable to find the folium/templates and folium/plugins directories. This is because bbFreeze seems to ignore them when compiling the Folium Python library to the standalone, as they are not Python scripts, but local .txt files.

So, after running $ python setup.py, open distdir and find library.zip.

1. Copy library.zip to the Desktop or other suitable place.
2. Extract (unzip) the files from library.zip to the Desktop.
3. Find where Folium is installed on your computer (probably /usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/folium/).
4. In the Folium installation, find /templates and /plugins. These are the folders that don't contain any .py files, so are ignored when bbFreeze does its (sub-optimal) magic. Paste these into the extracted library (on the Desktop) at /Desktop/library/folium/.
5. Now, you've fixed the only problem with bbFreeze for our purposes. Zip up /Desktop/library on the command line with $ cd Desktop/library/ && sudo zip -r library.zip ..
6. Copy this new library.zip (it will be inside Desktop/library/library.zip) and paste over the old one in \distdir.
7. You're ready to go! Now when you run the executable, it will be able to find the tile templates and JS plugins it needs to create and display the map!