Today in the Park
About
About Today in the Park
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.

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Credits

Moon images from NASA

Astronomical data from weatherapi.


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