One of the most common needs and use of weather information is to stay on top of breaking severe weather events. In a previous post, we explored using the NWS API to retrieve the current forecast for a specific location. Let’s walk through how you would retrieve any active weather alerts for your area.

Many APIs that provide location-specific information require information like an address or geographical coordinates to provide the correct data. Some APIs specifically require longitude and latitude coordinates for successful calls. How do you get that information for a specific location? In the past, it has not been easy to find, but many services now provide geocoding. I’ll share a sample using an API that Nominatim/OpenStreetMap exposes to retrieve the necessary information.

Although Python might be a 30-year-old programming language, it’s an easy language to adopt, provides a lot of capability through external libraries, and is supported on major operating systems like Linux, Windows, and Mac OS. Likewise, there are plenty of weather data sources to retrieve information like current conditions, forecasts, and severe weather alerts. The National Weather Service (NWS) API allows developers access to critical forecasts, alerts, observations, and other weather data. The API was designed with a cache-friendly approach that expires content based on the information lifecycle. All the information available via the API is open data and free to use.

Using a home-based server to publish your website or other web-enabled services where a static IP address isn’t available requires manual updates of DNS if your IP address were to change, or using a Dynamic IP service that automatically handles that update for you. Depending on your DNS host, you have several options to make that process as hands-free and automated as possible.

If you’re new to PowerShell with Dell Storage, be sure to take a look at this post. Depending upon the size of system that your managing, over the course of time, you might have experienced some challenges in managing disk resources, especially if you’re using an array in a lab-type environment. Here’s an easy way to inventory volume objects on your SC Series array which are not currently mapped, and also find out how much actual space they’re consuming.