Point and Click Changes Spring of 2017

NWS Partners,

As part of a continued effort to modernize weather.gov, the NWS is upgrading their point forecast, zone forecast, and product pages. Once these changes go live at some point this Spring of 2017, all existing bookmarks to forecast.weather.gov will change. Links to a forecast page will display an error message that includes a URL to the new location. You will need to update your bookmarks to continue to access our forecasts quickly after the upgrade. After the upgrade, the new URL can also be found by searching for your location from forecast.weather.gov or www.weather.gov. These changes will not affect office pages located at www.weather.gov

If you run an automated process to get NWS data from forecast.weather.gov, you will need to switch to the new developer API once the upgrade is completed. Specifications for the new API can be found here.

The primary focus of the upgrade is to make the forecast pages more reliable during weather events, but there are some new benefits of new forecast pages that include:

· Addition of 7 day hourly forecast information to the point forecast page

· A new mobile-friendly landing and graphical/tabular forecast page

· Low-bandwidth optimization for all pages, on a partial roll-out at launch

· Option to automatically detect your location on a mobile device

· A new widget mode that allows you to customize the information on the point forecast

The NWS has overhauled the architecture of their application platform to provide a more stable and consistent weather service to meet the demand of severe weather events. The platform also introduces a modernized API that will make it easier for web developers to create high-quality applications and services to share NWS data (read more here). The updated web site now provides a complete mobile-friendly experience with optimizations for low bandwidth and customized weather widgets. We also have new data centers located in College Park, Md., and Boulder, Colo., to provide 100% backup capability for the operational data used within the forecast and decision support process.

We look forward to providing you with useful and timely decision support services using our improved connectivity and new design.

For more details, please read the Service Change Notice. Feel free to contact our office WCM, John Quagliariello, if you have questions.