Interactive Map with 7-day weather forecast and geocoder

Article describes main features and usage of the free online web application, which includes:

• Interactive map, powered by Microsoft Bing™ technology [1, 2]
• Geocoder capable of converting postal address to geographic coordinates
• 7-days US weather forecast module, utilizing the NOAA web service [3]

Geocoder with interactive Bing™ map

Geographic coordinates system in general includes longitude, latitude and elevation (height), but the most used are the fist and the second ones, namely longitude/latitude. They could be presented either in degrees:minutes:seconds (so-called DMS) format or decimal degrees (DD) format (used in this application). Geographic coordinates provides the unified way to identify any place on earth. City streets could change their names and numbers, but the universal coordinate system, free of daily vanities and challenges of time, presents perpetual time-invariant numeric values on a planetary level. Free geocoder is capable of converting postal address to the corresponding pair of longitude/latitude. Such geocoder in conjunction with interactive online Map allows different views, panoraming and zooming capabilities, serving both practical and didactic goals.

Weather forecast

7-days US weather forecast web control is linked to the geocoder/map module, described above. It utilizes the free NOAA web service, covering most of the USA territory, providing the day/night temperature reading in both Fahrenheit and Celsius units (see the attached picture, showing the NY weather forecast taken on Feb 6th of 2011; btw, the Super Bowl Sunday).

Usage

In order to obtain the longitude/latitude information with corresponding interactive map (and, optionally, corresponding 7-day US weather forecast) of the geographic point of interest follow the steps described below:

• Open web browser and navigate it to the Interactive Map with weather forecast and geocoder
• Enter the postal address into the search box and click on the "USA Weather" screen button
• Upon the completion of screen reload, the page should display: Longitude/Latitude, 7-days weather forecast and corresponding interactive Bing™ map. The map allows different view modes (road, aerial or bird’s eyes) and various zoom level (from 1…19).

For the places in the US system is capable to find the geographic coordinates and produce the corresponding weather forecast based just on ZIP code, as shown in the picture (note: ZIP code 10111 corresponds to the Rockefeller Center). Also, many landmarks in the New York City could be identified just by their names without any postal information. For example, system could accurately resolve and process the search query worded simply: "Grand Central Terminal " without specifying the exact street address, City, ZIP. In regards to the Super Bowl XLV (taken place at the time of writing on Feb 6th 2011), the corresponding weather forecast and the online map could be obtained just by entering the search query as “Cowboys Stadium, Arlington”, or just by its ZIP code of 76011.

Afterword

Interactive Map with weather forecast and geocoder [1] is compatible with all 4 major Web Browsers:

• Microsoft Internet Explorer
• Mozilla Firefox
• Google Chrome
• Apple Safari

Geocoder and Interactive map implements multi-lingual capabilities, enabling to process search queries entered in many foreign languages: Spanish, German, Italian, French, Russian, Greek, etc. (weather forecast could be not available in places outside the US). Sample test results are shown below, corresponding to some world landmarks, entered in a search query in the language of origin:

• Grand Central Terminal, NY: Longitude: -73.9770, Latitude: 40.75299
• La Tour Eiffel, Parc du Champ de Mars, Paris: Longitude: 2.294350, Latitude: 48.85884
• Brandenburger Tor, Unter Der Linden, Berlin: Longitude: 13.38188, Latitude: 52.51661
• Colosseo, Roma: Longitude: 12.49109, Latitude: 41.89135
• Museo del Prado, Madrid: Longitude: -3.69252, Latitude: 40.41381

References

1. Interactive Map with weather forecast and geocoder
   
2. Bing™ Map interactive SDK
   
3. NOAA's National Weather Service
   

Disclaimer: this content is provided on ‘AS IS’ basis without warranty of any kind

Copyright © 2011 Alexander Bell