Weather forecast applet for Ubuntu

Question

Background

Prior to cycling to work in the morning, I'd like to know if I need to cart rain gear for the way home.

The xfce4-weather-plugin sits in the lower-right hand corner of the panel and is almost perfect:

Similarly, My Weather Indicator cannot show the evening forecast by default, nor does it appear to be configurable as a panel indicator. Also, it's gigantic (even on the 'small' setting) and draggable.

Problem

The problem is that these tools show the current weather, which offers the same information as looking out the window. Extra time is required to show the daily forecast, including what to expect for the evening.

There is no way to configure it to show the evening forecast by default instead of the current conditions.

Question

What applet (or plug-in) can be customized to display:

• a raincloud icon in the panel if the day is expected to end in showers (partly cloudy, etc.)?
• the probability of precipitation (also for the evening)?
• using a small amount of screen real estate (e.g., ~70x50 pixels)?

Note that a panel indicator or applet, specifically, is sought.

Answer 1

Conky is a nearly-infinitely configurable system monitor that could be set to display weather. It should be in Ubuntu's default repositories (maybe universe or multiverse).

There's even some built-in weather display options, here's a section from man conky:

weather URI locID data_type (interval_in_minutes)

Download, parse and display METAR data.

For the 'URI', there are two possibilities:

http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/ http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/

The first one is free to use but the second requires you to register and obtain your partner ID and license key. These two must be written, separated by a space, into a file called .xoaprc which needs to be placed into your home directory.

'locID' must be a valid location identifier for the required uri. For the NOAA site this must be a valid ICAO (see for instance https://pilotweb.nas.faa.gov/qryhtml/icao/). For the weather.com site this must be a valid location ID (see for instance http://aspnetresources.com/tools/locid.as‐ px).

So for example, this should show the current temperature at LAX (KLAX) and update every 10min:

${weather http://weather.noaa.gov/pub/data/observations/metar/stations/ KLAX temperature 10}

weather_forecast URI locID day data_type (interval_in_minutes)

Download, parse and display weather forecast data for a given day (daytime on‐ ly).

For the 'URI', for the time being only http://xoap.weather.com/weather/local/ is supported. See 'weather' above for details of usage

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If the above doesn't work perfectly, then a pre-made theme/script should, like https://github.com/zagortenay333/Harmattan
(From How to add the town name to the conky Harmattan configuration?)

Or this one could work: https://github.com/zagortenay333/conky-Vision
(Found from this answer on unix&linux)

There's is a super-long forum thread on ubuntuforums.org Conky weather scripts using Accuweather/WUnderground/NWS/Weather.com but I wouldn't go near it without a search engine.

Just googling conky weather script should be great.