Today in the Park is a web application that displays key information about parks to visitors. It supports multiple parks, listed on the home page. For each park, the system assembles a large amount of information from a variety of sources:

What it reports

• Today's weather conditions: high and low temp, cloud cover, sun and moon rise and set, moon phase.
• Current weather if there is a weather station monitored by US Weather Service.
• Forecasted weather: high, low, cover, air quality for day and night for next 3 days.
• Alerts: park-generated emergency alerts, safety reminders, and park closures
• Campground status: reservations and vacancies. For NPS parks, vacancies are retrieved from recreation.gov.
• Upcoming Events. Calendar events for next 3 days.
• Contact information, for recreation.gov and local park.

How Visitors Access the Information

Visitors can view:

• A public web site, that has all the information, including forecasts for next 3 days for every weather point the park has identified.
• A TV display for visitor centers that rotates through the pages. Works on any TV with a built-in web browser (most modern TVs).
• A Daily Bulletin, which summarizes today's information on one printed page for use on bulletin boards.

Where the data comes from

• Weather: US weather service (weather.gov) retrieved using GPS coordinates (not "nearest city" or zip code).
• Astro data (sun, moon): weatherapi.com
• Air Quality: weatherapi.com or NOAA (airnow.com)
• Calendar: For NPS parks, the calendar is retrieved from NPS.gov. Parks can also keep a calendar using Google calendar or most other apps that produce iCal output.
• Alerts: Create an alert with a title and expiration date/time. View and copy from current weather service alerts.
• Current Weather: obtained for accessible online weather stations.
• Campground Vacancies: Retrieved from recreation.gov or manually entered by park staff.
• Safety and Closure notices: manually entered by park admin.

Features for Park Administrators

• Alter the display of calendar items to indicate Canceled until some future date.
• View US Weather service alerts for their area and create local alerts with expiration dates.
• Create park announcements about closures or other things
• Create safety tips for users
• Update campground status, including vacancies and rates
• Set park fire status
• Create park contact information
• Set the pages that will appear on TV rotation
• Add local Admins

Try It Out

There is an example site at explore.todayinthepark.info. Contact admin@todayinthepark.info for login information.

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Credits

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Version/build: 2.1.8 / -2-g2874802 (2026-08-11 10:45) on ß :beta
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