Sorry for the pun; I was just goin’ with the flow…  Anyhow, I was looking at some online hydrograph charts to see how deep the River was getting, and noticed that the URL of the graphic itself had some interesting parameters in the title, including the name of the Omaha Gage (OMHN1) and also a parameter called “output”.  So far as I can tell, there are two workable values for the output parameter, “tabular” and “xml”.  The XML setting does as its name implies and outputs the data in a very friendly XML format.  ”Tabular”, on the other hand, gives a people friendly HTML view of the data (probably rendered server-side from the XML; That’s how I’d do it, anyway).

I’d originally intended to do something cool with the data, like an Android widget that shows the gage level on the home screen, but making widgets turns out to be quite a bit more difficult than I’d thought.  At some point in the future, this will probably still happen, but it’s just not a priority at the moment.

In the meantime, to check out the data for yourself, head on over to:

http://origin-water.weather.gov/ahps2/hydrograph_to_xml.php?gage=omhn1&output=xml

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Omaha Maker Group, Projects, Technology by Kevin