In 2001,I moved to Texas for my first job after graduate school at Clemson University. One of my first experiences in Texas was a set of storms that produced several tornadoes in the surrounding areas. A few years later when browsing Freshmeat.net,I found StormSiren. StormSiren provided email notification of weather activity in a timely fashion that I might have otherwised missed due to factors at my job. It was nice to be able to receive warnings via email since this area had larger,more violent storms than I was used to in Tennessee. However,I was dismayed when it quit working a while back due to changes on the NWS site. At that point I didn’t really have a desire to learn Python as my experience when needing to do scripting vis Java or C++ was Perl. However,earlier this year things changed.
In April of 2008 my family in Tennesse was hit by a Tornado. While they were luckier than others,the sheer force of the storm was amazing. What made it even more frightening was that I didn’t even know that my family was under the proverbial gun of a tornado producing storm system. I felt helpless as I listened to my sister on the phone of what had happened. After talking to the rest of my family I couldn’t help but continue to think about how clueless I was and even they may have been without any warnings. The pictures of the destuction created by the storm to my family and other’s houses only made me sit in a mire of disbelief. It didn’t take me long to think of StormSiren.
I knew that long ago StormSiren was no longer able to cope with changes that the NOAA site had made to the weather reports that it generated. With a little investigation I found that the NOAA had started publishing weather alerts using an XML format named CAP. I’ve since began a rewrite of StormSiren to include the ability to parse the new XML format along with several enhancements including per alert device alert areas and new alert device types. A Mercurial repository at https://www.cfreeze.com/hg/stormsiren is now available to allow others to track the progress and join in this rewrite. I’m releasing this work under the BSD license. The repository contains two example configuration files named “StormXmlSiren.conf”and “StormXmlSiren-log.conf”. These files,for Unix like environments,should be stored in $HOME/.StormXmlSiren.
Posted from Rowlett,Texas,United States.
