Weather in Google Maps | Hacker News Reader

Weather in Google Maps

google-latlong.blogspot.com

75 pointschrismealy17 comments

This is a very nice feature, but I think I still prefer http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ This page also has the ability to see where percipitation is currently. I find that this helps with my bike commute in Portland frequently.

Also reachable at http://fullscreenweather.com

Why did it take so long to do this? (Don't get me wrong, I think it's great and I guess I hadnt thought of it)

Also the next obvious step would be to add doppler radar and satellite cloud coverage, not just pictures of suns and moons everywhere.

I zoomed out, and was able to see clouds.

It's interesting to see they're pre-rendering the composition of the weather layer on top of their regular map. Where I work we have our own styled map tiles and probably would do a layer of transparent cloud tiles over our (unmodified) regular tiles. It just takes too long to re-render deeper scales.

That said, if I was serving up as many tiles as google does, I'd go for it this way too. You already need a buttload of resources just to handle the request volume, might as well exploit that to save the user on download time and yourself on bandwidth.

At Stormpulse we also bake the cloud layer into the base tiles.

What I'd really like is a weather API - I just spent 2 hours looking into a decent one to use. (The National Weather Service doesn't seem to report the current temperature. :/)

I still haven't been able to find an API to get yesterday's weather. I've been trying to make a site that doesn't show straight up temperature but a percentage based on known value (yesterday's temp).

For current conditions, you could try YQL, but I'm not sure if it's really current. (A good article: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2009/12/extending...)

The NOAA service (http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/rest.php) that I've used before just does time series, so you might be able to get the most recent time, but you're right, I haven't been able to find a NOAA API for current data.

Maybe Weather Underground? http://wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/API_-_XML looks decent. I use their regular pages all the time.

Have been waiting for this since early 2005. Now I wonder when they'll take a stab at severe weather.

My educated guess is years from now if ever. There's no worldwide severe weather dataset, so any foray into that market would look half-baked or worse, biased towards first-world countries (ie nations with good metereological data).

The thing about weather sites is that they usually overwhelm users with information. 80%+ of the time, a user wants to know, will i need a coat or umbrella today? Or the general temperature.

Thankfully, the weather channel has cleaned up forecasts (was once a huge mess): http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/37202

Love this site: http://www.thefuckingweather.com/

I hope google make this available in their api as an overlay, I think my users would love it.

I totally agree with the information overload. I usually use http://weather.ericson.net/

Have you seen Stormpulse? Our goal is to eliminate information overload even when the weather gets nasty.

I invite you all to try out the website for the weather company I work for: http://preview.my-cast.com/

I think the animated radar map is the best I've seen among all contenders (wunderground, weather channel, and now the google weather offering).

You may want to see this one for comparison as well:

http://www.theweathernetwork.com/weather/maps/on_toronto/cao...

Too bad it doesn't work outside the U.S. (which wunderground, weather channel, and google weather) all do.

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