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I'd very much like to set up some shortcuts to the Current Meteorology products in a similar way that some others have done for Europe and Australia, for the regions and locations that I most frequently access. If you'll allow this, do you have any documentation available on the CGI parameters, etc?



We do not allow this capability anymore because in the past, our website had an exponentially increasing number of automated requests for the meteogram and other programs in READY and we found that these requests were coming at a rate of several requests per second by a few users all day long. This overwhelmed our system and caused many response problems for our regular customers. The decision was made to either remove the meteogram from the web or make it so that only users going through the READY menus can access it. The latter was decided. Although it will make it somewhat harder for you to access now, you also now have the ability to define a location once and request all READY products for that location without having to reenter the source each time.

Other reasons we do not favor this direct access include:

1. If we make changes that involve the inputs to the CGI script, then those pages that link directly cause many problems for our server with bad requests. This has slowed our server considerably in the past.

2. It causes the user to not see the main pages of READY to be alerted to changes or outages that we may have.

3. This type of access tends to multiply quickly with every local home page having direct links to our perl scripts, further slowing down our system. It also proliferates the concept of using other's work without acknowledgement.

So, the short answer is no we cannot provide the inputs to the CGI scripts and no we do not allow access in this way.

Glenn Rolph
02/2003
Modified: December 4, 2019
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