Earlier this week CBC.ca launched a brand new weather section. The new weather section has been re-written from the ground up using some pretty cool technology to get the forecast to our users as quickly as possible.

Automatic Location Detection
Using technology from our Content Delivery Network, Akamai, we’re able to figure out with 95% accuracy where in Canada you are visiting the website. We take this information and automatically redirect you to the closest weather station.

This technology isn’t perfect, so you might not get your preferred location automatically. If that happens, just type in a location you would like to the the weather for and click on the “set as my default” link to save your preferences.

Easier To Read Forecasts
The weather pages now include larger icons and text to better understand the forecasted weather. In addition, we have included radar and temperature maps from the CBC Weather Centre on every page. We have also included a handy way to change between Celsius and Fahrenheit temperatures!

Improved Weather Warnings
The weather warnings now link directly to Environment Canada. As well, on the front of every regional page, you will get a list of warnings that affect the region.

How It All Works
CBC gets weather data from a variety of sources including: Environment Canada, WSI, and our own Weather Centre. These various feeds are delivered to CBC.ca where a Java application called “weatherconditions” parses the data and outputs it as flat HTML to the website.

The application uses two libraries to do the heavy lifting. One called “smooks” to parse and process the XML and CSV data that we get from the data sources. The other is called “freemarker“, which is a templating language to place the various pieces of information on the HTML pages.

The weatherconditions application is constantly running on our server and processes the data sources every 15 minutes.

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	CBC.ca web site, Under the Hood