HAMweather 3 - SCS Plug-in

Contents:

Overview:

The SCS plug-in allows HW3 to parse the US Summary & Travelers Forecasts from the NWS HYDROMETEOROLOGICAL PREDICTION CENTER. The report can be found online at:
http://www.hpc.ncep.noaa.gov/discussions/scs.html

Credits:

Credit has to go to Greg Verner from  http://www.minnesotaweathersource.com was the original creator of this plug-in. He passed the plug-in to HAMweather to be improved upon and released to the public.

Greg would also like to give credit to Bill Whisnant of http://www.shelbyweather.com and Nick Shipes of http://www.weatherquests.com/ for helping test and provide insight on the original plug-in.

I (Greg Verner) would like to add this. Without the help of Lee Huffman, author of HW3, this
plug-in wouldn't have had the capabilities as it does now. Great work Lee, thanks a bunch!.

Requirements:

The SCS plug-in requires that HW3 have been previously installed and is working correctly..

Installation:

    Installation of the Tropical plug-in is fairly simple per the following steps:

Step Description
1 Confirm that HAMweather 3.0 or newer is installed and working correctly. 
 
2 Decompressing the Distribution:

The first step is to download the "zip" distribution of HW3image from the HAMweather Download Site and decompress the software package.  You can use  Winzip or something similar. 
  
3

Upload the Files:

The Installation requires the uploading of files to your server, specifically to the CGI side of the HW3 installation.  You will need to upload the following files to your current HW3 installation:

  1. Upload the "FetchSCS.php" file to the hamlib/HW3Plugins directory.

    The following should be installed in the paths indicated after you upload the file:

         hamlib/HW3Plugins/FetchSCS    .php
          
  2. Upload the files with-in the distribution's "configs" directory to the "configs" directory of the HAMweather 3 installation. NOTE: You are not replacing your current "configs" directory but simply uploading the ini files to the "ini" directory on the server.

    The following should be installed in the paths indicated after you upload the in the distributions "configs" directory:

         configs/fc_scs.ini.php     
     
  3. Upload the files with-in the distribution's "cgi-bin/templates" directory to the "templates" directory of the HAMweather 3 installation. NOTE: You are not replacing your current "templates" directory but simply uploading the template files to the "templates" directory on the server.

    The following should be installed in the paths indicated after you upload the in the distributions "templates" directory:

         templates/scs.html
     

 

Accessing:

For instructions on accessing and using HW3 review the HW3 access instructions.  To access the different SCS data you will need to set the 'forecast' or 'do' parameter to the following:

Parameter 
Setting		 Description
forecast=scs Used to fetch the and parse the US Summary and Travelers Forecasts

To access the SCS plug-in and have it parse the data you will access a url similar to:

    hw3.php?forecast=scs&dpp=0

Parameters:

Here is a complete list of all the parameters that can be passed to the SCS  plugin via the query string or form post:

Parameter Description
dpp By default HW3 will attempt to figure out the city you want information for. While this does not hurt anything it is a waste of processing time and resources so you can add the parameter "dpp=0" to make HW3 not attempt to figure out which city information is needed for.


Template Variables:

The SCS plug-in offers the following template variables, broken down by module:

Template
Variable		 Description
%%issue_date%% Issue date of the report
%%issue_year%% Issue Year of the report
%%site_total%% The total number of cities in the report that data was found for.
%%site_name#%% The name of the city. Where # is a number between 1 and %%site_total%%
%%site_lo#%% The days low temp for city specified by #.
%%site_hi#%% The days high temp for city specified by #.
%%site_precip#%% The days precip for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast1_lo#%% The next days forecasted low temp for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast1_hi#%% The next days forecasted high temp for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast1_wx#%% The next days forecasted weather for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast1_icon#%% The next days forecasted weather icon for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast2_lo#%% The second days forecasted low temp for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast2_hi#%% The second days forecasted high  temp for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast2_wx#%% The second days forecasted weather for city specified by #.
%%site_forecast2_icon#%% The second days forecasted weather icon for city specified by #.
%%precip_ending%% The time of the last precipitation measurement.
%%us_temphi%% The US high temp for the day.
%%us_temphi_day%% The day that the high Temp Occurred
%%us_temphi_site%% The location of the high Temp.
%%us_templo%% The US low temp for the day
%%us_templo_day%% The day the low temp occured
%%us_templo_site%% The location of the low temp.
%%summary_day_name%% The day name of the summary.
%%summary_mon_name%% The Month name of the summary
%%summary_day%% The day of the month of the summary
%%forecast1_day_name%% The next day forecast day name.
%%forecast1_mon_name%% The next day forecast month name.
%%forecast1_day%% The next day forecast day of the month.
%%forecast2_day_name%% The second day forecast day name.
%%forecast2_mon_name%% The second day forecast month name.
%%forecast2_day%% The second day forecast day of the month.