Space Weather

Issued by XMDV Radio, created by William Greenwood, supported by the NOAA

"Utter Radio's answer to the shipping forecast" - Garry Morrisroe

While Checking the weather one day i got distracted. The Met Office has a page hidden away on their website called "Space Weather" describing the current solar climate (its actually pretty complex and unstable).

I quickly attempted to get their API. unfortunately, for some unknown reason, they where not going to give me free access to huge amounts of valuable data that a large amount of man-hours had gone into interpreting. Luckily the US Government was.

The plan: An automatically generated space weather report. Generated every day and broadcasting on all my stations as well as the newly associated Utter Radio, who's playout system I now had the password for.

Originally attempting to bodge it to work with the audio streaming scripting language liquidsoap, I instead chose to switch to python. It requests the .txt file provided very kindly by US taxpayer dollars, does a ton of regex to get it formatted properly, runs it through a TTS (eSpeak with the Scottish accent), sticks a ident at the start and end and then underlays a bed (sonified data from the sun).

At some point I plan on building some kind of system to sonify the day's solar data (also kindly provided by the NOAA).

It currently broadcasts between 10pm and 2am on Utter Radio.

You can listen anytime, or read-along with the regex-ified version here. (blocked on some connections due to the weird port, no SSL and dynamic DNS)