Current weather forecast through email/winlink

I wanted to document this as a reference. When in the field (or anywhere) that you have accèss to create an email, including using winlink, and you’d like to get the current weather conditions and forecast you can send an email to the National Weather Service. Momentarily you will receive a reply with weather conditions for your county.

Let’s cut to the chase. In your email include the following (this is for Dane County Wisconsin)

---

Recipient: NWS.FTPMail.OPS@noaa.gov

Subject: anything you’d like

Body:

open
cd data
cd forecasts
cd zone
cd wi
get wiz063.txt
quit

---

Send your email and in a few moments you will receive a reply with the current weather conditions for your area. The above email will get you a reply that includes this information.

You can get information for any US.county by changing two things, the state abbreviation under the zone line and the text file name on the “get” line. For example to get information for Iowa county replace the get line with get wiz062.txt.

---

Another example to show the substitutions for Hartford, CT, the body of the message would be:

open
cd data
cd forecasts
cd zone
cd ct
get ctz002.txt
quit

---

If you want the full help file replace the text in the body of your email with the word “help”

If you want to get information on a different county you will have to find the appropriate file name. All of the available files can be found under each state abbreviation here: https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/zone/

I haven’t found an easier listing connecting county to file name but if I do I’ll update this post.