Carousel 5.2.6 has been officially released!

To those of you who have been patiently waiting for your weather bulletins and crawls to update, your wait is over! Carousel now retrieves weather data via WeatherBug rather than the National Weather Service FTP site. Gone are the days of battling the firewall to open the FTP ports, as access to firewall-friendly HTTP port 80 is the only requirement.

We tried to keep the user-interface changes as minimal as possible, so if you knew how to use weather bulletins before, you know how to use them now. The only big difference is that you now use a ZIP code instead of selecting your State and County. We’ll automatically find the closest WeatherBug station to your location and use it as your weather data source.

Weather crawls have another bigger change, namely that you can now specify the exact format of your weather crawl. The Carousel manual has been updated accordingly, so check it out.

Finally, the number of data fields you have access to has increased dramatically. Here is a partial list of the available data fields:

• #City# = Saint Paul
• #Country# = USA
• #Currently# = Cloudy
• #DewPoint# = 51
• #ElevationFullString# = 922ft
• #GustWindFullString# = 27mph NNW at 8:01 AM
• #HumidityFullString# = 66%
• #PressureFullString# = 29.71″
• #RainMonth# = 2.32
• #RainYear# = 5.58
• #State# = MN
• #TemperatureFullString# = 63°F
• #WindFullString# = 3mph NNW
• #outlook# = Tuesday: Mostly cloudy. Scattered sprinkles. Highs 65 to 70. Northwest winds around 15 mph. Wednesday: Partly
  cloudy in the morning then clearing. Highs around 75. North winds around 10 mph. Thursday: Mostly sunny. Highs around 80. North winds 5 mph.

We’ve been working incredibly hard on this, and we sincerely thank everyone for their patience while it was under development.

To request this update, please email our support team at support@trms.com. In your email, please include:

• Your name and organization
• Your current version of Carousel (How do I know what version I have?)
• If you haven’t yet filled out a customer registration form, please head over to http://www.trms.com/registration and fill one out.

To see the full release notes for this version, please see our forum post.

Thanks!