The National Weather Service has a long history of producing useful and simple "plain text" products summarizing weather and climate information. One of these products is known as the Regional Temperature and Precipitation (RTP) Report. The RTP provides daily summary reports of high/low temperature, precipitation, snowfall and snow depth observations from various networks including ASOS and COOP. While the RTP can be easily read by humans, it also uses SHEF encoding that can be processed by computer software. For various reasons including workload, software changes, SHEF encoding being ancient/horrid and the year being 2025 not 1985, the NWS has announced full termination of this product generation. So since the IEM already processes most of the data from the NWS that went into the RTP and sadly is well versed in SHEF encoding, a simple generation "autoplot tool" has been added to create the RTP on demand for folks that may still wish to use such a product. There are some notes on the page on how you can automate the download of the generated product as well.

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Tags:   rtp   coop   shef