Today in the Park is a web application that displays key information about parks to visitors. It supports multiple parks, listed on the
home page.
For each park, the system assembles a large amount of information from a variety of sources:
What it reports
- Today's weather conditions: high and low temp, cloud cover, sun and moon rise and set, moon phase.
- Current weather if there is a weather station monitored by US Weather Service.
- Forecasted weather: high, low, cover, air quality for day and night for next 3 days.
- Alerts: park-generated emergency alerts, safety reminders, and park closures
- Campground status: reservations and vacancies. For NPS parks, vacancies are retrieved from recreation.gov.
- Upcoming Events. Calendar events for next 3 days.
- Contact information, for recreation.gov and local park.
How Visitors Access the Information
Visitors can view:
- A public web site, that has all the information, including forecasts for next 3 days for every weather point the park has identified.
- A TV display for visitor centers that rotates through the pages. Works on any TV with a built-in web browser (most modern TVs).
- A Daily Bulletin, which summarizes today's information on one printed page for use on bulletin boards.
Where the data comes from.
- Weather: US weather service (weather.gov) retrieved using GPS coordinates (not "nearest city" or zip code).
- Astro data (sun, moon): weatherapi.com
- Air Quality: weatherapi.com or NOAA (airnow.com)
- Calendar: For NPS parks, the calendar is retrieved from NPS.gov. Parks can also keep a calendar using Google calendar or most other apps that produce iCal output.
- Weather Alerts: View current weather service alerts, and copy/paste to make your own alert
- Current Weather: obtained for accessible online weather stations.
- Campground Vacancies: Retrieved from recreation.gov or manually entered by park staff.
- Safety and Closure notices: manually entered by park admin.
Features for Park Administrators
- Alter the display of calendar items to indicate Canceled until some future date.
- View US Weather service alerts for their area and create local alerts with expiration dates.
- Create park announcements about closures or other things
- Create safety suggestions for users
- Update campground status, including vacancies and rates
- Set park fire status
- Create park contact information
- Set the pages that will appear on TV rotation
- Add local Admins
Try It Out
There is an example site at example.todayinthepark.info. Contact admin@todayinthepark.info for login information.
Credits
Moon images from NASA
Astronomical data from weatherapi.
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