Weather alerts in Xastir

If your country has an agency that produces weather alerts and someone feeds that information into the APRS internet service in the appropriate format, and you have shapefiles that correspond to the zones reported, Xastir can highlight those zones with stippling to indicate the type and severity of the alert.

At this time, only weather alerts from the U.S. are making it to APRS-IS, and only the U.S. National Weather Service makes their shapefiles easily available.

National Weather Service shapefiles can be downloaded using the get-NWSdata script included with Xastir.

Requirements

Using Weather Alerts requires that your build of Xastir have shapelib support, which in turn requires pcre2 (required by dbfawk).

The get-NWSdata script requires the wget program so it can fetch the shapefiles.

Tip

The National Weather Service periodically issues new sets of shapefiles. get-NWSdata is updated when the Xastir developers become aware that there are new shapefiles, but that may not be promptly after new files are available. If you run get-NWSdata and find that it reports that it can't find the files it's trying to download, please report it as an issue on Github, and we'll update it as quickly as we can.

If you are relying on packaged versions of Xastir, you will not get the benefit of updated get-NWSdata scripts until your distro packages a new release, which might be a while (especially if it's a long time before we issue a new release). Building Xastir from source from our git repository is the only way to be sure you've got the latest.

Note

The get-NWSdata script will download all the files Xastir knows how to use. But if you want to look for yourself for those files, they are downloadable from http://www.weather.gov/gis/AWIPSShapefiles, which also has additional information about them and shows when new files will be coming out.

Important

In addition to releasing new shapefiles, the National Weather Service has been known on occasion to change the information that is packaged with them in their DBF files. When this happens, the dbfawk files we use to deal with them become outdated and we must create new ones. This, too, can lag the actual release of the shapefiles.