                     Storm-Tracker
                     -------------

Storm-Tracker is a collection of Perl modules designed to work with
tropical storm advisories issued by NOAA.  The modules maintain an
insert and query only file based database.  Examples of the type
of advisories this collection can work with can be found at
ftp://ftp://ftp.met.fsu.edu in the /pub/weather/tropical/WTNT3/ and 
/pub/weather/tropical/WTPZ3/ directories.

This collection is still very much in the beta stage.  It is possible 
that future maintenance and development will be assumed by Dr. Paul Rusher's
group within the meteorology department of Florida University.

PREREQUISITES

All modules were developed on a system running Solaris 2.5.1. and
perl version 5.005_02.  The modules contain only perl code and
should run on any flavor of UNIX.  The code directly manipulates
file paths and therefore will not run under windows without modification. 

The Storm-Tracker bundle requires the following modules be installed.

	IO::Dir
	IO::File
	File::Path

These packages should be available on CPAN if not in the core distribution.

INSTALLATION

You install the Storm-Tracker bundle as usual by running:

   perl Makefile.PL
   make
   make test
   make install

DOCUMENTATION

POD style documentation is included in all modules.
These are normally converted to manual pages and
installed as part of the "make install" process.  You should also be
able to use the 'perldoc' utility to extract and read documentation
from the module files directly.


SUPPORT

The Storm-Tracker bundle is not currently supported.  Dr. Ruscher
or one of his associates may take on the task, but then again he/they
might not.  It is my hope that even without support the modules
will prove useful to someone else, even if only as a starting place.
Please insure that any significant improvements or additions are
posted to CPAN for everyone's benefit. 

AVAILABILITY
 
The current version of Storm-Tracker should be available from CPAN:
 
     http://www.cpan.org/


COPYRIGHT

	1999 Jimmy Carpenter. All rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.
