Oh Sure, It Doesn't Look Like Much

... but it took a little effort to parse the text on the California rainfall page into a table with the names of the cities and their percent of normal rainfall totals to date from this year and last. I used PHP Simple DOM Parser to scrape the page and then dealt with the results as a string. It turns out that NOAA didn't make a table of results, the lazy dogs, and instead just used the "pre" HTML tag to create what looks like a table on their page.

CRESCENT CITY	90	40
EUREKA	131	36
UKIAH	164	18
REDDING	170	31
SACRAMENTO EXEC AIRPORT	205	36
SACRAMENTO - CSUS	165	0
SANTA ROSA	173	18
SAN FRANCISCO	206	29
SFO INT'L AIRPORT	228	26
OAKLAND AIRPORT	191	34
LIVERMORE	211	52
MOUNTAIN VIEW - MOFFETT	261	32

Next up - creating a MySQL table and inserting these values into it. Then we'll create a chron job to do it on a daily basis and after that, it's time to look into graphing them.