Topic: NWS CAP transition frustration

[JPB]

As Ken has pointed out, the NWS finally decommissioned its v1.1 CAP/ATOM service and now only supports v1.2.

That's fine - my script has supported v1.2 for a while now and I kept the v1.1  interface as well as it was a nice 'fallback' when the v1.2 was down (and it had been down, or at least, inaccessible to me a couple of times in the past year.)

HOWEVER....

• The UI to the alerts online has simultaneously changed. It no longer offers (as far as I can tell) direct URL access to a webpage giving the details of an alert via the alert's ID. I've always felt that it was best to point my webpage to an 'official NWS page' for the alert, because alerts are important, and sending people to the NWS website is part of that. But - that's gone now - so I had to implement a simple display of the 'alert details' due to that loss. Yes, there is still an NWS interface to enter your lat/long, or manually, enter the NWS alert ID to get to the details of an alert, but those options aren't optimal. I can think of no good reason to lose this interface at the NWS; I hope it comes back, as it should be trivial for them to code such a thing.
• The NWS actually supports its information being given in both JSON and XML formats using the same URL. You'd get one or the other based on how you set up the 'Accept' parameter. Before, there was largely concurrence between the two - all that differed was the data format back to the requestor of the information. But, for some reason, v1.2 XMS doesn't provide the 'instruction' information but JSON does. WHY the difference?

Perhaps these minor issues are being resolved as I type this. I know they aren't exactly over-staffed at the NWS (far from it!). But it would be nice to get these minor issues resolved.

Does anyone know of a way to reach them and request resolution of these? Some sort of 'suggestion box'?

[saratogaWX]

They do have a direct URL for the specific alerts available at

https://alerts.weather.gov/search?zone={zone} which works for both forecast and county zones (maybe even marine zones too)

I agree that the transition was rocky (still is) and there seem to be variations between what is provided in JSON v.s. XML.  I switched nws-alerts to use JSON for the queries because XML format wasn't initially available. Sigh.

[JPB]

They should invite the amateur community that uses these feeds to be part of a beta program, and give us a way to provide feedback. I am going to guess that there are more of us than there are professionals in the industry who grab these feeds.

[dwhitemv]

If you want to know when changes to NWS products are coming, monitor this page:

https://www.weather.gov/notification/

From that page, you can request to subscribe to a mailing list to get messages when new public info statements & service change notices are posted. NWS has a formal change management process, including requests for comments on upcoming changes.

In most cases, new links/output/etc. are available ahead of the changeover date to facilitate software updates.

I'm going to guess that the XML/XSLT based UI got very little to no traffic and it wasn't worth the time to update the tech. The public mostly gets alerts from mobile emergency alerts (WEA/EAS), the news media, and weather apps and those outlets don't need to direct people to a copy of the same data decorated with the best of what 2002 Web design had to offer.

There's also that XML for Web presentation purposes was abandoned with the release of HTML 5.