Another useful and interesting custom task (written by Michael Waltuch) is found in the Community Showcase section of the Explorer Resource Center. It's a good example of a custom task that leverages an available Web service for use within Explorer.

Weather Finder locates the nearest weather station to a specified location and reports its most recent weather observations. The task is based on a reverse geocoding web service located at GeoNames.org. To learn more about GeoNames go to their web site and see the service description.

To use the task, first go the the Community Showcase, locate the task, and click to add it to Explorer.

We can activate the task and click on our map to find the current weather, or we can use a result as the input location. Let's use Find Place to locate Manhattan.

Now that we've found Manhattan, we'll right click the result and use Send To and choose Weather Finder from the list (we also could have done this via the result popup window).

Now that Manhattan is the Weather Finder search location, click Find. The nearest weather station will be located, and we'll automatically zoom to it. In this case the nearest weather station is found in Central Park.

The popup window associated with the weather station includes a link to the National Weather Service's Telecommunication Operations Center which includes a 24 hour summary for the weather station.

You can also click the link in the popup to show the National Weather Service's Web site for this location. Here we see that currently it's a balmy 57 degrees in Central Park under overcast skies, with 6-mile visibility and calm winds.