Changes for version 0.36 - 2026-08-31
- Modernized the distribution metadata and added GitHub Actions CI across representative Linux Perl versions plus current macOS and Windows Perl.
- CI installs runtime/test dependencies explicitly and runs prove directly; dist.ini remains author/release metadata and is not used or invoked by CI.
- Added a dedicated coverage job that enforces 100% statement and subroutine coverage using deterministic offline tests. Devel::Cover still reports branch and condition coverage, but those historical-parser metrics are informational rather than release gates.
- Replaced the legacy recursive t/unit suite with the deterministic top-level t/ suite for CI; the old nested tests depended on live NHC access and on generated placeholder accessors from pre-0.36 internals.
- Marked the superseded t/unit tree for pruning in dist.ini as a safety net for author checkouts upgraded in place; CI does not use dist.ini.
- Retained the historical generated Storm accessors latitudelongitude, latitude_numberic, kmzFile34kt, kmzFile50kt, and kmzFile64kt as deprecated compatibility accessors while documenting the current NHC field locations.
- Reorganized HTTP access, CurrentStorms.json validation, and storm resource classification into small internal modules so networking, parsing, and product dispatch can be tested independently. Existing public fetch_* methods remain compatibility wrappers.
- Added Dispatch::Fu for the multi-input resource/type classification boundary; this creates a single declarative dispatch point instead of repeating resource conditionals throughout Storm.pm.
- Standardized object construction on Util::H2O::More and removed the direct Util::H2O dependency from this distribution.
- Added load_json() and load_file() for offline/replay/archive processing, named fetch() options, injectable HTTP::Tiny-compatible transports, validate(), and validation_warnings(). The historical positional fetch($timeout, $file) form remains supported.
- Reviewed NHC's Tropical Cyclone Status JSON reference and current product examples, and compared parsing assumptions against the StormSurgeLive storm-archive corpus, including the complete 2026 season-to-date archive and historical snapshots beginning in 2022.
- Updated the lightweight CurrentStorms.json contract for observed NHC behavior: Central Pacific CP1-CP5 bin numbers are accepted, current camelCase latitudeNumeric/longitudeNumeric fields are recognized, peakSurgeKML is recognized, nullable product objects remain valid, and previously unknown additive storm fields are preserved and reported as warnings rather than rejected. No JSON::Validator/JSON-Schema dependency was added.
- Added an optional xt/archive-compatibility.t maintainer test for checking every archived CurrentStorms.json under a local StormSurgeLive/storm-archive checkout without making that large archive part of the CPAN distribution.
- Added peakSurgeKML download support and Central Pacific basin identification.
- Removed direct dependencies on JSON::XS, HTTP::Status, Validate::Tiny, HTML::TreeBuilder, Date::Calc, and unused Getopt::Long; core JSON::PP and Time::Local now cover the required functionality.
- Fixed StormTable::get_latest_table() so downloaded storm.table content is actually ingested, corrected get_by_year_basin() indexing, and made missing get_storm_numbers() queries return an empty list reference.
- Fixed forecast-advisory month rollover to advance the year when a forecast crosses December into January.
- Rewrote and corrected POD throughout the distribution, including the RSS method names, offline/archive use, NHC compatibility behavior, current storm fields, GIS products, ATCF conversion, and the resource-catalog boundary intended to support future filtered bulk downloads.
Modules
client and object interface for NHC tropical cyclone status data
provides handy extraction and conversion functionality for use with the NHC forecast advisory text
small, injectable HTTP boundary for Weather::NHC::TropicalCyclone
resource/type catalog for NHC storm products
one active storm from NHC CurrentStorms.json
convenient access to the list of historical storms https://ftp.nhc.noaa.gov/atcf/archive/storm.table, which is in ATCF format. Although it looks like and can be treated in many cases as CSV, field width is importan when considering this type of data operationally.
lightweight validation of NHC CurrentStorms.json data