Weather forecasts from weather.gov as JSON

On every National Weather Service forecast page, there's an orange XML button. Don't know what I'm talking about? Here:

screen shot of weather.gov's locator map with XML button.

The button is web 2.0 relic from when the conventional wisdom was that people used feed readers. Some of us still do...but that's a story for another time.

I've looked at that XML button more than once and thought: "it'd be really cool if there was a JSON equivalent". Well, there is! Clicking that button sends your browser to a URL like:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=32.7153&lon=-117.1573&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml  

Notice the FcstType=dwml part. I don't know why, but I figured that maybe, just maybe, dwml is the response type. I changed dwml to json and...voilĂ , JSON response! Check it out! It even has an Access-Control-Allow-Origin:* for CORS. Or, if you're an animal, you can use JSONP with a callback query string parameter. Every once in a while, you stumble on something that makes you smile. This was one of those times.

Have I mentioned I like weather data?