The TechBrew home office has been seeing some interesting weather lately, not the least of which was a 600-foot-wide tornado that ravaged a nearby town. Weather alerts via RSS can be a no-kidding life saver in these kind of circumstances, especially with a mobile reader on your cell phone.

The US National Weather Service offers RSS feeds of weather alerts by state, but they are link-only items… the title contains an alert heading, but you have to click through to their website to see the actual information.

To make matters worse, the alerts don’t have a pubDate, so your reader can’t tell when it was issued. These factors severely cripple the usefulness of the feed, both in terms of convenience and timeliness. You can get better RSS feeds at a local (zone) level, but not at the state level.

Interestingly, the Weather Service also offers CAP/XML of state-wide alerts, which do contain the full alert messages as well as the time they are issued. Here is the URL for the CAP/XML alerts for Colorado:
http://www.weather.gov/alerts/co.cap

The XML contains all sorts of goodies that could be leveraged or massaged into some useful RSS items. Queue Mashup, roll tape…

So, I would like to issue a challenge to anyone interested: Create a Yahoo Pipe (using the new Fetch Data module, of course) that produces good RSS with the following qualities:

1. Provides alerts for any state, allowing for keyword filtering (allowing the user to limit by city or county name).
2. Full-text of the alerts. Bonus points for nice formatting, with proper line breaks at the very least.
3. A proper pubDate for each alert.

If you’re new to the Fetch Data module, you may find it helpful to read this write-up on parsing OPML with it.

When you come up with a good solution, write it up in your blog and drop a comment here with a link. (Or just comment here with a link if you prefer.)

Naturally, I’m cheating and have already started.

April 7, 2007 Update:

The solution got a bit complicated, as I ended up merging data from both state-level CAP/XML and zone (county)-level RSS.  The latter was primarily to get a better-formated item description.  Here is the result: National Weather Alerts via Yahoo Pipes.