NHC RSS Feed Updates

In response to customer feedback, the National Hurricane Center has updated its RSS feeds to improve content delivery and to provide more useful information. The changes have been tested and enhanced by working with several customers and partners who use the National Hurricane Center's data and advisory services. The edited feeds are effective Wednesday, 17 September 2008.

Below is a summary of the changes:

1. The per-storm feeds now indicate the status of storm advisories for each of the 5 individual NHC "wallets" for both the Atlantic and Eastern Pacific basins. If a storm is not active in a particular wallet, the RSS feed will indicate "No current storm". This change helps prevent RSS readers from displaying old or stale NHC advisory information, a common complaint.

2. The 10 per-storm feeds will update on a more consistent basis and will always be available through "auto-discovery" on NHC's main web page at http://www.nhc.noaa.gov. Most modern web browsers indicate the availability of such RSS feeds by using the RSS icon .

3. Feeds are now W3 compliant and have been tested with http://validator.w3.org/feed/ to ensure a wide range of RSS readers can process the xml files. RSS readers will now be able to determine when NHC content was last updated and when the RSS feed was last published. For example, the previous RSS feeds did not contain the <pubDate> code...which is needed by RSS feed readers to properly determine the age of the RSS content. Additionally, appropriate NHC contact information is now provided in the feeds.

4. The per-storm and full basin feeds will contain information for the GIS data files that NHC is producing (see example feeds below for more information).

5. Feeds will start incorporating more use of the CDATA tags to preserve HTML formatting. This structure can be seen in the Graphical Tropical Weather Outlooks feeds.

6. New RSS feeds have recently been introduced, such as: