ClimaCell Weather API: fully customizable hyper-local API
climacell.co
climacell.co
The ClimaCell API docs say the weather API offers forecasts for 1) realtime, 2) hourly, 3) nowcast, 4) daily
The free-tier pricing plan [1] apparently offers limited access to 1-3 but no access to 4. That's too bad, but then no paid-tier plan offers 4, either. So, I have to wonder, Am I missing something or are they?
I can compare it with 3 other APIs. I haven't been rigorous about it, but so far I feel like it has been the most accurate for near-term forecasts.
Where do you get the data? How is it different from https://openweathermap.org/api ?
Are there APIs demo call that we developers can try?
Is there a cap limit, if so how much?
What are the pricing plans?
I am also working on similar efforts, focused on using labelled photos of the sky with ML to extract weather data from outdoor photos, and using barometers in phones: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.allclearwe...
I'm shocked there aren't more efforts in this space. I know IBM is using barometers in phones now, and I suppose Apple may try that post-Dark Sky acquisition, but I'm still surprised there aren't more!
But, there's need gap in all these weather API's; they lack actual recorded historical weather data and provide only forecast data. Actual recorded weather data is important for any research conducted with historical weather data.
[1]https://abishekmuthian.com/covid-19-temperature-correlation/
Is there no way to just download an archive of previous history of weather data for a location?
I tried to use WU for my COVID data research and it didn't have data for the Chinese cities.
Error 400 - "location is not defined correctly".
Not that I'm their target customer anyway...
But ClimaCell is serious about new data being used, real forecast analysis, and verification, etc.
The future of weather APIs and services is much brighter IMO, now that Dark Sky is out of the picture.
There are severe limits to this technology. It cannot detect the initiation of new precipitation. They never publicly explained what they were doing with their barometer data, which they claimed to collect for forecasting. But in such an active area of basic science research, they did not contribute data or algorithms or papers or any discussion at all. I believe it is because they did not overcome the challenges of using the noisy phone data to produce useful weather forecasts. But they lead people to believe they do. I am suspicious.
Dark Sky didn't use ML AFAIK when they started, it was straight statistics. Maybe they did change to add ML, I don't know, but for my knowledge of the space, they always used core math and statistics while ignoring physical science and not participating in the research community, or any community really.
I would love to know more about how Dark Sky worked. My gut feeling is that it is largely a scam, because they never published any of their own reanalysis data, or verification data for 1-minute forecast accuracy, etc.
They were so closed-off in an industry that is traditionally hugely open, and they made large claims without backing any of it up publicly.
I also take major issue with the claim that they provided reasonable forecasts. I think their forecast accuracy was extremely low in many cases and fares very poorly when put against competitors: https://theoutline.com/post/3826/crap-weather-apps-meteorolg...
Edit: "The scam" is that they exaggerated accuracy claims without backing it up.
At the moment I use openweathermap but interested in better ones.
Available models can be found here: https://www.meteomatics.com/en/api/request/#model_selection
Select it from the "Source" section in the options.
[1] https://github.com/ersimont/weather/blob/master/src/app/sour...
For historical data, can you get historical forecasts as well as actuals?