Hey all,
Newbie (hopeful) ant keeper from Arizona here, starting to get excited for the season. This will be my first go, and despite them being rather difficult to care for by comparison to other species, I am really crossing my fingers for a Myrmecocystus. Now, that the intro is out of the way, I will get down to my topic.
With topics such as the following:
I started getting really interested in a way to automatically notify when anting conditional are optimal, and since I am a newbie I wanted to poll all of you.
I noticed that one of the recommendations for data was weather.gov and then I realized they allowed you to pull down data: https://water.weathe...ip/download.php
They also offer a RESTful API, which will make calls to it much easier.
If it could be automated to pull down the data, parse it, and match it against set criteria, location, history, etc... What data points would be the best to test for?
So far I am thinking notifications using something along the lines of:
- Any rain (predicted, past 24-48 hours, or current if I can get data that would provide this level of granularity)
- Temperature increases of 10-20 degrees within 48 hours after a rainfall
- Whether or not the criteria has been met previously within the year (to rule out locations that may have already had their flights)
All of which would be bounded by a pair of lat,long pairs to determine a search area.
Ideally I would like to make this notify (probably e-mail) when the conditions are met so that you can leave it running at home, or on a server on DigitalOcean, etc.
What are all of your thoughts on this? Would you like to see something like this? Are these data points enough? Are there more I am not considering?
