NOAA RSS feed download and join

[PhilipWelsh]

Hi everyone,

I'm trying to craft up a Python script that will download the XML files from this RSS Feed - http://alerts.weather.gov/cap/us.php?x=0

After downloading them, I'd then like to join them with the April 2015 shapefile from NOAA - AWIPS Map Database Catalog - Public Forecast Zones

They have similar naming conventions so it should work. I'm new to Python so I don't really know where to begin. I've read about BeautifulSoup, Feedparser, Requests, etc. but I'm still confused.

I have IDLE, the arcpy library, Arc Desktop 10.2.2, and Python 2.7.5.

The main goal of this script would be so that I don't have to rely on the NOAA ArcGIS Online services for data. There are times when it is down but I still need geospatial watches & warnings.

Thanks in advance. Looking forward to help.

[BruceHarold]

Hi

In the feed entries the 'geometry' is given as sets of UGC or FIPS6 boundary names, for each weather warning.  You could read the XML with Requests, extract the records, generate geometry by (say) a Query on a feature service in ArcGIS Online or a local copy of the boundaries, then do a local overlay with your shapefile.

This is quite a mission for someone new to Python.

An alternative, if you have money to throw at this (licensing an extension), is creating a custom data format using the Data Interoperability extension - no coding but some configuration, based on reading RSS.

Regards