Technologies Used

(Link: http://wx.uconn.edu/)

• PHP, JS, HTML, CSS + MySQL Database
  • Built using Drupal v7
  • 3rd Party Drupal Modules

At the Heart of the Portal

Weather Sources

We source weather information from 3 different sources:

1.  Weather.gov
2.  Weather Underground
3.  Accu Weather

Source #2 is no longer operational (maybe due to changes on Weather Underground's end?) and #3 was not implemented; therefore, the following is w/respect to just the first source. 

Unified Weather Outlook

The home page of the Weather portal boasts weather of UConn Storrs, UConn Health and all UConn regional campuses: Storrs, Avery Point, Farmington, Hartford, Law School, Stamford, & Waterbury.

In the middle of the home/landing page, we are displaying a Satellite / Radar — however, the source Stormia.io seems to have shutdown its operations.

At the bottom of the home/landing page, we are displaying detailed forecast—for each of the 7 locations:

Method

The way we are accomplishing this, is using PHP Client URL Library (cURL) to fetch 7 different webpages from Weather.gov. I wrote a simple function that takes in a URL and then returns the fetched data—as shown below:

function fetch_weather($url) {
$ch = curl_init();
$timeout = 5;
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_CONNECTTIMEOUT, $timeout);
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_USERAGENT, 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.2; WOW64; rv:17.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/17.0');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_REFERER, 'https://forecast.weather.gov');
curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_FOLLOWLOCATION, true);
$data = curl_exec($ch);
curl_close($ch);
return $data;
}

There are 7 distinct URLs (each URL has been pre-set to a specific campus), as shown in the table below:

The data returned by the method is then parsed and crafted; this is what yields the top and the bottom part of the page: weather at a glance, and the detailed weather sections respectively.

The middle part—the satellite/radar, is a simple iFrame embed.

The Sidebar

Event Ca