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Comment by freefal | Hacker News Reader

It's crazy the people download these ad-laden apps to simply get a weather forecast.

https://mobile.weather.gov is really nice lightweight website with no ads.

If you like it, do understand the Republican Party just last year nominated and voted in Berry Myers, the co-owner of AccuWeather, who spent years trying to prevent the NWS from publishing forecasts to you and the rest of the public, to head the agency in change of the NWS.

Your favored website may soon enough be taken down in order to enrich the Myers family, but it will be packaged as reducing costs or not "competing with industry" aka AccuWeather.

Damn, I had no idea that happened.

Stuff like this and the shenanigans at the FCC w/ Net Neutrality really makes me rethink the concept of these types appointments not having more public involvement.

There's a great Audible original piece on this topic written by Michael Lewis called 'The coming storm':

If it gets taken down, he'll probably be able to find another one.

Accuweather perhaps?

Funny you mention it, forecast.weather.gov is now the first link on my phone browser's start page. I made the switch after the wunderground app started refusing to update and otherwise glitched out constantly. The only downside is I have to actively think check the weather in the morning rather than just have it presented.

It sucks how badly wunderground has gotten. I run my own weather station and it only syncs to WU. Almost tempted to intercept the api calls and store the data locally...

Weather Underground is yet another IBM company. So is Weather Channel.

"On October 28, 2015 IBM officially announced an agreement to acquire The Weather Company’s business-to-business, mobile and cloud-based web properties, including Weather Underground, WSI, weather.com, and also the Weather Company brand."

IBM buys firms and then proceeds to eviscerate them. Value destruction is their strong suit.

"Storm" used to be a GREAT weather app, until they basically just ruined it and then forced people over to the Wunderground app. Which is also pretty bad.

I suspect that a company the size of IBM can do positive things, too.. so, lets not curse the situation, eh?

OMG, they have a mobile version?! Man, I've been using the regular one and just pinching and zooming everywhere to find things.

But, honestly, I love weather.gov. The local forecast (at least for the Pittsburgh area) is plain text, easy to understand (if you read the definitions), and updated multiple times per day. Plus, it has in depth forecasting for rain/snow/etc.

I stopped using weather.com because it would routinely crash my mobile browser. I suspect because it ran out of memory.

I love this 3-day graph the best:

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=<your latitude goes here>&lon=-<your longitude goes here>&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical is my favorite.

Just substitute your XX.XXXX latitude and your YY.YYYY longitude (negative from 0 if you're in the US) for the <> and their contents as variables.

There's also a tabular form of this. Very dense in terms of hourly forecasts. I tend to plug in various lat/long changes to figure out when a storm is going to blow into the kid's sporting event clear across town. Each degree of latitude or longitude is 68.3 miles, so you can usually just adjust the URL to get a pinpoint forecast...which is useful in metro areas where you might be traveling 40-45 miles to an event.

> Each degree of latitude or longitude is 68.3 miles

That's only for latitude, longitude depends on latitude, so lon = cosine(lat) * 69.172

Not entire crazy given popular perception of mobile as being an app-driven platform. And not at all coincidental given former CEO of AccuWeather Barry Myer's direct involvement in crafting policy which prohibits NOAA from developing mobile apps[1]:

In 2008, AccuWeather named Conrad Lautenbacher, a recently departed NOAA administrator appointed by President George W. Bush, to its board. Myers was soon appointed to a NOAA working group that gave him a role in shaping policy. He helped fashion one in 2012 that restricted the organization’s ability to develop mobile apps for the public.

This is the same guy nominated by the Trump adminstration and currently awaiting Senate confirmation as the head honcho of NOAA.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...

I am clearly a minority (based on incidents ranging from this, to how weather bug was the first killer app of the web, or how my grandfathers tv was permanently on the weather channel), but I've never understood the attraction of weather info.

I mean, the forecast isn't accurate far enough in advance to make most plans, and the weather today is usually obvious from any window, at least as far as I can actually use the info (which is how warmly to dress), but realistically I never pay attention and just dress for the season and it never seems like the difference day-to-day matters.

I definitely value forecasting hurricanes/blizzards/tornadoes, but that doesnt seem to be the general attraction.

I ride a bike every day. Knowing the morning and afternoon temperature determines how I dress. It's also incredibly useful to know if it's forecast to rain or snow for my ride home, so I can bring the right jacket. That's basically why I check a weather app every day.

And here in New England, knowing if it's going to rain or snow on the weekend, might effect what plans you make. We also have times of the year where the temperature can change 40F or more between morning and afternoon.

So looking out the window and deciding how warmly to dress, can leave you pretty uncomfortable later in the day. :)

the forecast isn't accurate far enough in advance to make most plans

This depends on your location. Cities immediately east of a large city get very good forecasts. The reason is that, like with any other industry, better people end up in larger cities. This gives the large cities better forecasts, and there is a halo effect eastward since in the United States weather generally travels west to east.

the weather today is usually obvious from any window

There are a lot of places in the nation, and the world, where weather changes rapidly and often. Many people who live in these places use the phrase, "If you don't like the weather, just wait." And each thinks it invented the phrase.

I never pay attention and just dress for the season and it never seems like the difference day-to-day matters

Be glad you have the luxury of living in a place with very stable weather. Or be sad that you don't travel enough to understand that the weather is variable in most places on earth.

> I mean, the forecast isn't accurate far enough in advance to make most plans.

This isn't the case for me in NYC. Anything within the next two days is fairly accurate.

I use the day's temperature info to decide what to wear in the morning. I use the UV index to decide if I need sunscreen. And while I don't use umbrella's, I know coworkers use the weather to decide if they should bring an umbrella.

> Anything within the next two days is fairly accurate.

Plans that involve the outdoors rarely involve only two days notice for me - plans are either spontaneous or in more than a week. Then again, my plans rarely involve the outdoors.

> UV index to decide if I need sunscreen

My skin tone is known as "fish belly", so I always need sunblock, but unless I'm planning to be outside at length (which I largely dont do) I dont really do so.

> decide what to wear in the morning

I may be odd, but my day to day wear doesn't really vary other than by season. When I lived in Pennsylvania and Virginia the weather changed dramatically enough over the day that dressing lighter or warmer was an invitation for problems. Now that I'm in Seattle, the weather is fairly consistent over the day, but I've never found myself wishing I had known the forecast when I dressed.

> I don't use umbrella's

Mostly the same, particularly here in Seattle. Before, if it was raining hard the need was obvious, and if it wasn't I didn't want to carry around something is just lose before I needed it.

I'm not trying to poop on your feedback (really!), it's just these are largely the arguments I've heard that dont seem to apply to me. Do people really spend that much more time outside than I do? Am I some sort of sky-avoiding freak?

But do you possibly understand "the attraction of weather info" better now?

The issue wasn't really the attractiveness of the info, so much as the attractiveness of constantly having the info. I personally get that info is sometimes useful ("We can go to the beach tomorrow, let's make sure it isn't going to rain"), and in the abstract, I get that it may be useful more often for some people, but I can't emotionally grasp that it's that useful, that often, for so many people.

It's the issue of competing norms - the weather (or at least, foreknowledge of it) doesn't affect how I dress or my activities for 350+ days of the year, over decades, living in multiple parts of the US, so it's hard to grasp that it does actually impact a notable portion of people. Clearly it does, and I've not questioned that (or at least I didn't intend to question that), but having more people tell me that it really, truly does hasn't changed my emotional incredulity that that is the case.

You have explained why this information isn't useful for you. That's fine—your self assessment seems reasonable. By all means, delete all weather apps from your phone!

However I think I've also explained why I find the information incredibly useful, for different reasons than you. It's an incredibly valuable service to me and most of my immediate peers.

When I neglect to check the weather in the morning, I do things like wear a long sleeved shirt that becomes overly hot in the middle of the day, because the weather had felt slightly chilly that morning. I work in an indoor office, but I go out to get lunch, and it's nice to not be overly hot or cold.

I will say that I find weather forecasts more useful in Spring and Fall than Summer or Winter. Right now, the answer to "what should I wear?" is almost always "thick clothes and a coat!" But then, there are also exceptions, and using the weather forecast to spot them is great.

(Actually, speaking of temperature, something I didn't mention—my apartment is always hot, so even with the window open, it's often hard to judge the current outdoor temperature without an app.)

Edit: Also, whatever your complexion: if the UV Index is 0, you don't need sunscreen. And if the UV Index is 12+, you absolutely should have sunscreen even if you're inside most of the day. It's worth checking!

> I think I've also explained why I find the information incredibly useful

You have, and your reasons are likewise reasonable - I just struggle to believe that there are so many people that are similar (but again, there clearly are - my struggle to understand doesn't change the facts). People who bike to work, for example, have lots of reasons to care about the weather...yet I seriously doubt that covers a significant portion of people that create the demand for weather apps.

Women tend to have more varied fashion and layers than men, so they would logically be more impacted by weather, yet there's no shortage of men that want that weather info. I get that they do...but I still have troubles accepting that my normal isn't, you know, _normal_.

If it makes you feel any better I feel pretty much exactly as you do and I’ve lived in a place (Michigan) with fairly volatile weather my whole life. You are not alone in weather apathy.

> Do people really spend that much more time outside than I do? Am I some sort of sky-avoiding freak?

Haha, have you noticed how half of the cars suddenly have ski racks as of the past month or so?

A pretty heft chunk of Michael Lewis's mini-book on corruption in the Trump administration centered on Accuweather's role at NOAA, and how companies like Accuweather do little more than repackage data generated by the federal government and pretend to be gatekeepers for it.

Supposedly, companies like Accuweather have been working for years to eliminate government weather services that are readily usable by consumers.

In support of the parent's remark, I highly recommend everyone read this excellent Bloomberg article[1] from last year which elaborates on the finer points. It surely made my blood boil at first blush.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-06-14/trump-s-p...

Previously: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15464755

Talking to people who had worked at higher levels of the weather world in government and academia, this is a generally common view of that kind of company.

Companies like Intuit have been working for years to prevent the government from having easy to use tax filing services. What else is new?

Do they have an API? I'm surprised more apps don't plug into this. Most watch-faces on my Pebble required me to get a personal Weather Underground API key (and now have stopped working). :(

Yes NWS has an API with quite a lot of data in XML format. Weather Underground api was supposed to shut off on December 31, but has been extended to Feb 15th of this year. Good riddance, it was very flaky, would return occasional bad data, and all around a bad experience.

From what I understand pretty much all countries have a government run weather service and they all have an API. The problem is they are all different organizations that have different APIs so all the weather api services do is combine every single one of the apis in to one that only requires one api key.

I've found apps that use these global API's are inferior to local apps connecting directly to local API's, the data is a lot more current, more accurate and includes a lot of features like radar images. Not sure if it's an issue with some countries missing a lot of data that mine (Aus) offer or it's missing for some other reason.

Phone OEM's always have to include a crappy global one for some reason.

Well that tends to be the case that generic interfaces to multiple APIs only provide the features that everyone provides.

Meteo API for Switzerland:

https://opendata.swiss/de/organization/bundesamt-fur-meteoro...

I really like the NWS's hourly forecast charts, and use those as my primary weather source. You can see an example here (scroll right if on mobile):

https://subraizada.com/weather/kmdw (A previous version used to show the normal weather forecast in an iframe to the left of the charts, too)

It's just a single HTML page, I've put a script to make them over here:

https://bitbucket.org/subraizada3/weather-generator/src

but the icons aren't as pretty

You're being sarcastic (I think), but the first thing I thought of when I looked at this site was "This could never be my go-to weather source, those icons are much too ugly."

more facetious than sarcastic. A lot of people care about the icons

An API is available, so you could theoretically write your own app to consume the API and style it as you wish.

Thanks for sharing.

The damned weather app in iOS is pretty useful too.

Right, when I just ask Google what the weather is like.

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