Experimental SPC Products RSS Feeds
Storm Prediction Center is providing tornado/severe thunderstorm watches,
mesoscale discussions, convective day 1-3 outlooks and fire weather outlooks
through RSS. This page is a brief summary of RSS, what it does and how
you can use it.
This is an experimental product of the National Weather Service.
Comments and feedback are welcome.
Information regarding the Use of NWS RSS can be found
here.
What is RSS?
RSS has several meanings: Really Simple Syndication, Rich Site Summary, and RDF
Site Summary where RDF in turn stands for Resource Data Framework. In
any case it is a method of summarizing the latest news and information
from a website in a lightweight form that can be easily read by any of a
number of news readers or news aggregators. The idea is to give users the
ability to quickly obtain the latest news and updates from a site in a
headline or news digest format. This in turn helps during high-traffic
periods by reducing the load on the servers.
What do I need to use the RSS feeds?
To use our RSS feeds, you need a feed reader or news aggregator installed on
your computer.
These are applications that can be set to read the feeds on a recurring basis,
generally once an hour or so.
For more information on downloading an RSS reader, click here.
Once you have installed a feed reader or news aggregator, you simply add the
SPC feed address to the list of feeds in the reader. The installation
instructions for the readers will help you with that. If your newsreader or
aggregator uses "auto-discovery" then simply enter the main SPC address
(http://www.spc.noaa.gov/) and it will find the feed.
What is the feed address?
The URLs for the SPC RSS Feeds are:
For tornado/severe thunderstorm watches, mesoscale discussions, convective outlooks, fire weather outlooks:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcrss.xml
For tornado/severe thunderstorm watches and watch status reports only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcwwrss.xml
For Particularly Dangerous Situation (PDS) tornado/severe thunderstorm watches only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcpdswwrss.xml
For mesoscale discussions only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcmdrss.xml
For convective outlooks only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcacrss.xml
For experimental public severe weather outlook multimedia briefings only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcmbrss.xml
For fire weather forecasts only:
http://www.spc.noaa.gov/products/spcfwrss.xml
What version of RSS do you use?
At the present time our feed use the RSS 2.0 specification.
What products are covered in your RSS feed?
The SPC RSS feed is updated whenever one or more of the following products
were issued by the Storm Preduction Center.
Tornado/severe thunderstorm watch: watch number and the link to the watch page and watch status page if issued.
Mesoscale discussion: MD number and the link to the MD page.
Convective Day 1,2,3 & 4-8 outlooks: valid date and time of the outlook and the link to the outlook product page.
Fire weather Day 1,2 & 3-8 outlook: valid date and time of the fire weather outlook and link to the fire weather page.
Why is the XML logo on the page?
The XML logo and the RSS logo are both currently in use across the Internet
to indicate to users the availability of RSS feeds from the site.
XML stands for eXtensible Markup Language, and is the basic lingo of the RSS
technology. We simply decided to display both logos.
Got More Questions?
If you have problems, questions, or feedback regarding the RSS feeds,
please send them to
spc.feedback@noaa.gov
or visit the SPC feedback page here.
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