# The KWeather Handbook

&GPLNotice;
2004-05-31
3.00.00

KWeather is part of the kdetoys package.

KDE
KWeather

## Introduction

KWeather is an application that provides both a panel icon, allowing you to watch the weather as reported by a local weather station, and providing a weather service that can track multiple weather stations and provide this information to other applications including &konqueror;'s sidebar and &kontact;'s summary page.

## Using KWeather as a Panel Applet

&RMB; click on an empty space in the panel and choose Add Applet KWeather

A configuration dialog will open up. Initially the only configuration required to make KWeather work is the ICAO location code:.

This is a four character code used by the weather reporting service to uniquely identify weather stations around the world.

As it's unlikely that most people will happen to know this directly, there is a link to a search engine where you can look it up.

While the weather stations available are fairly comprehensive, not every town in every country will be represented, simply because not every town has an appropriate weather station. If your own town is not represented, you should choose the one nearest you. Since flying planes safely requires accurate weather data, most towns with an airport will be in the list, so a good bet is to look for the nearest airport to you.

At this point, you can press the OK button and the dialog will close. You will now have an icon displaying the current weather graphically on your panel. Clicking it once will open a window that shows the weather in detail.

Further configuration is described in the next chapter.

## Configuring KWeather

### Display

Weather Station Options
  ICAO location code:

    ICAO stands for the International Civil Aviation Organization. The ICAO location code is a four character alphanumeric code that uniquely identifies airports worldwide. The first two letters of the ICAO code ususally identify the coutry. However, codes for airports in the United States usually start with "K", followed by a three character IATA (International Air Transport Assocation) code. For example, KORD is the ICAO code for Ohare International Airport in Chicago, Illinois. If you don't know the ICAO code for the airport nearest to you, you can click on the link labeled Lookup Your ICAO Code to use a web based search engine to find it.

Panel Display Options
  Show icon only
  Show icon and temperature
  Show icon, temperature, wind and pressure information

    You can choose here if the temperature should be displayed beside the icon, or if the current wind speed, direction, and air pressure are also displayed.

    The icon is always shown.

Logging Options
  Enable logging

    By default KWeather does not retain old weather information, and each time it updates the weather the old information is discarded. If you wish instead to keep a record of the weather, enable this option. Then, each time the weather is checked, KWeather will append a new line to the log file containing the current weather conditions in comma separated value form. The information written will be the date, wind speed and direction, temperature, pressure, cover, visibility, and "current weather".

  Log file

    If you have enabled the Enable logging check box, this option will become available. Enter or browse to the location you would like KWeather to keep it's log file.

### Weather Service

Station Manager

Update All Stations

  Update all the listed stations immediately.

Exit Weather Service

  Stop fetching weather updates for all listed stations, and stop providing weather information to the &konqueror; sidebar and &kontact;

## KWeather Interfaces

While the most obvious KWeather interface is the panel icon, there are several other places where you can access KWeather's information. These are particularly useful if you need to watch multiple weather stations. While &kweather; allows you to track multiple weather stations, the panel icon displays only one at a time.

These additional services are plug-ins to their respective applications, and not provided with KWeather itself.

## Credits and Licenses

KWeather copyright © Ian Reinhart Geiser geiseri@users.sourceforge.net

### Contributors

Will Andrews wca@users.sourceforge.net

  Fixes for BSD port

Ben Burton benb@acm.org

  Debian fixes

Otto Bruggeman bruggie@home.nl

  Fixed the i18n stuff and source style cleanups

Nadeem Hasan nhasan@nadmm.com

  Lots of bug fixes, improvements and cleanups.

Carles Carbonell Bernado mail@carlitus.net

  Great new weather icons

John Ratke jratke@comcast.net

  Improvements and more code cleanups

&underGPL; &underFDL;

&documentation.index;