January 2021 ==================== Stations are retrieved from https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/nsd_cccc.txt wget -O data/nsd_cccc.txt https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/nsd_cccc.txt dos2unix data/nsd_cccc.txt data/station_names.txt is used to provide correct orthography of the area where the station is located, which is used in the configuration dialog of kweather applet. The format of station_names.txt is ICAO;status;region_state;name;INFO1;INFO2 If status is one of none|false|na|decomissioned the station is ignored. INFO1 is what was previously the 5th position in weather_stations.desktop makred with ------ INFO2 is what was previously the 6th position in weather_stations.desktop makred with --- The source nsd_cccc.txt has illed information and structure that needs to be corrected in the files used in kweather. Some of the problems are: 1. decomissioned stations 2. names of station locations The genstations.pl is based on following idea Based on the input nsd_cccc.txt and the station_names.txt file we can generate stations.dat like following: for each station in nsd_cccc.txt do check if station ID matches one in station_names.txt if it matches then use the name of the station else use the name from nsd_cccc.txt write entry/line in stations.dat Based on stations.dat and weather_stations.desktop.in we can generate weather_stations.desktop. weather_stations.desktop will be updated with the names from stations.dat and the additional information will be preserved like following. for each station in stations.dat for each region from weather_stations.desktop.in if state is provided in stations.dat use the state to build a key with region and state else for each state in the states of the region use the state to build a key if section for this key exists and if name of the section matches stop processing proper section was found we add the station here write entry for the station There are few problems with this approach and the ill provided nsd_cccc.txt data 1. States are missing and thus correlation between station and state can not be done 2. When State is missing, based on the country/state name some entries are ambig Example Georgia and US state of Georgia Country list seemed to be used for the country names and as convention here wget ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/country-list.txt but the FIPS notation was dropped in 2008 as a standard, however continiues to be used. "The Census Bureau decided that, based on decades of using the terminology FIPS to describe its codes, it would continue to use the FIPS name for its updated codes, where FIPS now stood for FIP "Series", since there no longer existed an official FIP "Standard". [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FIPS_county_code] A mapping to ISO 3166 ALPHA-2 https://laendercode.net/en/2-letter-list.html seems more appropriate. TODO: check the country code mapping in weather_stations.desktop.in