In 2006, the NOAA National Weather Service (NWS) declared its first-ever Simple Object Access Protocol (SOAP) Web service (http://weather. gov/forecasts/xml) operational. Now, Web-applications developers can use Internet standards such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) and SOAP to access the NWS official 7-day digital forecast found in the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD). By using World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) data-exchange standards like XML and SOAP to disseminate these sensible weather forecasts, the NWS is embracing a future where its products and services are available in more convenient and understandable forms. Helping to realize that future, the NWS NDFD SOAP service ...