About WeatherBot

What is WeatherBot?

Weather forecasters predict what the climate will be like for a given geographical area for some time in the future. They are usually quite accurate, but often their predictions are off. WeatherBot seeks follow-up to weather forecasts. Each day, WeatherBot downloads weather forecasts for the next day from various news web sites for various cities in the United States and stores them in a database. The next day, WeatherBot goes to web sites that describe the current conditions for each of the forecasted cities and stores these live ("actual") values in the database. At any time in the future, a grade report can be obtained describing how good of a forecast a particular news company made.

What's behind the curtain?

WeatherBot is a collection of Perl scripts that automatically grab the weather forecasts and live data from various news sources. The raw numbers are stored in a Postgres database on a Linux server. Each web page, including the scores, is generated automatically each time it is accessed.

Who made WeatherBot?

WeatherBot has been a group project by Michael Hilsdale and Peter Keeler for the Information Retrieval and Web Agents course in the Computer Science Department at The Johns Hopkins University. WeatherBot is hosted by the JHU ACM Student Chapter.