Google Maps: Get Directions & Weather
Weather.com’s “Weather On Your Route” page is maddening. One must laboriously enter the location, date (month and day separately), and the two-hour period for which one would like to see the weather in that location. When planning a trip during the winter months, traveling primarily from south to north, and near one of the Great Lakes, the weather in some locations may be very, very different than at other locations. Plugging in this information is tiresome, and I’ve found myself on the Weather.com page entering information before a few days ago, when planning other trips.
After a few quick searches, I turned up one or two Google map applications that kind of did what I was looking to do, but none was quite as simple or as broadly conceived as I had in mind (I make no claims of doing anything close to an exhaustive search). I wanted to easily enter the beginning point and end point of a trip and I wanted to easily see the weather at various points along the route. I decided that I would simply create one for myself, which I am sharing with whomever now. Moreover, I’ve wanted to do something with the Google Maps API anyways for quite some time and this provided a fine excuse.
The little Google Maps application can be found here:
http://www.digitalobjects.org/sandbox/weather-directions/
In any event, the NOAA’s National Weather Service has my gratitude for making its data and forecasting freely available via XML. The XML is transformed, twice, with XSL stylesheets, once to collate the information in the NOAA XML feed and the second time to sort the information for orderly display in the Google Map application. I look forward to when XSLT version 2.0 is available as new functions will eliminate the need to parse the data twice.