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Comment by knadh | Hacker News Reader

The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required.

https://developer.yr.no

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Lucky for them that they’re not a public service in Germany, otherwise they would get sued for unfair competition (and lose): https://www.deskmodder.de/blog/2020/03/12/kostenlose-warnwet...

They still publish all their data free of charge and are required to do so by law. For weather forecast, they dump all parameters of their recent model runs.

So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...

Like Meteocool? https://github.com/v4lli/meteocool

Developed by a former colleague of mine. Open source and my favorite for 2h forecasts about upcoming rain in Germany.

The app „Tiny Weather Forecast Germany“ (https://codeberg.org/Starfish/TinyWeatherForecastGermany) seems to exactly make use of that. There are probably others, but it is the only one I found on F-Droid.

For context, from the court ruling (BGH, DeepL translation):

  Originally, it was envisaged that all services provided by the DWD to the general public for public dissemination via modern means of communication, such as mobile devices via an app, as specified in Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge (Explanatory Memorandum to the Government Draft of a First Law Amending the Law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 22). The Bundesrat has commented on this and raised competition law concerns about the tax-funded DWD making meteorological and climatological services available to the end consumer free of charge, because such a free charge constitutes an impediment to established private-sector providers and erects barriers to market entry for new providers or new offerings (explanatory memorandum to the government draft of a first law amending the law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 25). The version of Section 6 (2a) DWDG that has become law is based on the resolution recommendation and report of the Bundestag Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BT-Drucks. 18/12836, p. 2), according to which not all services provided by the DWD to the general public pursuant to Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge, but only those pursuant to Section 4 (1) Nos. 3 and 7 DWDG.

Quite interesting reasoning given in how many places the state intervenes and how high taxes are.

Though then again not that surprising that they manage to publicly fund something and then ruin it, leaving the taxpayer in the worst condition. I believe there’s even no official source of laws online in Germany decades after the internet has made it cheap and easy to provide access to information.

No disagreement on the weird reasoning from me, but I don't think the part about the laws is true. gesetze-im-internet.de is, according to their Impress, run by the ministry of justice.

They law part is not true, according to the website they provide almost all of the German laws. The site is also linked from the ministry of justice itself, so it is definitely legit: https://www.bmj.de/DE/Service/GesetzeInternet/GesetzeInterne... They even have an RSS feed when laws are updated: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/aktuDienst.html (Funnily enough, they also say IE 6 does not support the RSS feed)

It’s legit but not complete, it’s not the official form (amtliche Fassung) and only the current laws, not the historic view. In Austria for instance RIS is much more complete: https://www.ris.bka.gv.at/

Edit: not directly related but a fun fact: in Switzerland you can get a copy of the constitutional laws for free at any bookstore and it’s supposed to be understandable for normal citizens and not only for lawyers.

Interesting, did not now about the amtliche Fassung. But the full archive with the amtliche Fassung is also published online for free, starting from 1949: https://www.bgbl.de/xaver/bgbl/start.xav

They also mention it on the gesetze-im-internet website: https://www.gesetze-im-internet.de/hinweise.html

It seems that the Austrian way is much better though.

Good point. It’s even worse with court decisions. Every lawyer needs access to them. But there is no free central source for them. Instead, the government has made a deal with a private company, which itself is a spin-off of a former government entity, which receives court decisions directly from the courts. And they then sell it as a membership to lawyers and professionals, with the profits going to that private company. It’s a government subsidized monopoly. On access to documents which were created by tax funded institutions. Which all citizens need for access to the court system. It is quite a disgrace.

I think the alternative would be much worse. It's perfectly fine as it is.

The person with the most freedom of speech in their bank accounts should be able to have the most say in how the government runs. Because they have most freedom of speech at stake.

This is comparing apples to pears, as the saying goes.

Only the free app was deemed anticompetitive. All the data is available: Geoservers: https://maps.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (weather and warnings) https://cdc.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (climate infomarmation) https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/geodienste/geodienste.html (Overview)

You are also free to embed all the information from the website (maps, etc.) and there is also the raw data server: https://opendata.dwd.de/

New Zealanders pay taxes for a weather agency and a separate climate agency, neither of which provides weather local for most farms (one farm client of my agtech automation business is an hour from town; the weather report only applies to town).

Additionally, the weather service is a "state owned enterprise" expected to turn a profit.

So everyone who needs farm weather uses yr.no

After covid, I'm going to go talk to some politicians about our weather forecasting problem.

Who are you planning to talk to? A National MP will be in favour of just selling it and then bungle the IPO returning very little to the government. A Labour MP will propose opening it up but then get distracted trying to pass other legislation that nobody wants.

That aside you might make some progress talking to the Greens if you framed it as an environmental issue.

> After covid

what do you mean? are there still restrictions in NZ?

Maskless face-to-face meetings are more effective than masked ones, in my opinion. Nevermind more effective than email or a phone call. I'd like to meet when I can have a frank discussion without a mask on so that we can gauge one another's sincerity and receptiveness to an idea.

Why can't you have a maskless face-to-face meeting? I'm having maskless face-to-face meetings in Auckland all the time.

Well, my coworker's wife wound up in the hospital because he brought covid home, and I don't want mine to. I wear a mask, he never did. Case load hasn't dropped much yet.

Also, even if I didn't care, there's no guarantee any of the politicians will meet me maskless yet.

Is weather forecast enough for agtech business. Until recently I was in that industry and apparently the local weather station was the way to go for accurate predictions. we have a few of these hardware companies here in Europe and always wondered why this was necessary, knowing that we have some of the most accurate predictions here in central europe. How is it for you in NZ?

It's not that my business is weather, it's that I can't do certain things in the rain, and not being able to work out a schedule is a big problem. It can cost people and businesses a lot of money. It can cost the country a lot of lost tax revenue.

If yr.no weren't providing us free weather, we'd get a lot less done, because we wouldn't know the weather 2 or 3 days in advance because our forecasters do not tell us what is happening a 45 minute drive up a valley from here.

I'm somewhat surprised. The National Weather Service in the US has a website: https://weather.gov. There is a radar map https://radar.weather.gov/ and forecasts https://digital.weather.gov.

They also publish the data for free, such as map layers/radar https://opengeo.ncep.noaa.gov/geoserver/www/index.html or the weather forecasts https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/weather-climate-models/na...

In the past The Weather Channel lobbied to get public access shut down but failed but most people selling weather data compete by building improved forecasts, local knowledge, etc on top of NWS data. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into the space.

Commonwealth countries also have something called "crown copyright" unlike the US putting all tax-funded works in the public domain.

I still don't really understand it.

I believe it was Accuweather (sic) and Rick Santorum.

I have a weather app on Android and, as a New Zealander, wanted to include NZ data. MetService made it difficult and costly. When I asked how much for radar data, they essentially asked how much the app earned. I wrote to MP Megan Woods about this but never got a reply. Philip Duncan of WeatherWatch in NZ has fought this in the past. There is also a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on MetService:

https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/5b3b826f79/weather-permittin...

My weather app has five weather models that cover NZ include a high resolution model from Expedition Marine, an NZ based meteorologist. I hope to bring model farming related weather data in the future.

I've set up an iPad in my hallway to show their SVG weather charts. Super simple to integrate into a simple home made dashboard website.

Here is Oslo: https://www.yr.no/en/content/1-72837/meteogram.svg

That's a great idea

Apple api - nope. Norwegian Meteorological Institute api - yup.

That’s mostly in jest though (sent from an iphone) but also because Apple bought darksky (which was my preferred weather api/source in the past) and I’d assume that’s a big part of/rolled into the weatherkit offerings now?

Check out the giant red warning at the top of this page: https://darksky.net/forecast/40.7127,-74.0059/us12/en

Interesting. The notice doesn’t appear within the Dark Sky app at all. But the Weather app does have a lot of improvements, I think. Perhaps under iOS 16 we’ll just see the Dark Sky app disappear and get replaced by the Apple Weather app.

I assume the Dark Sky app simply disappears from the App Store on December 31, and existing copies display an error message directing you to the weather app.

I loved dark sky, I'm using it for my own smart home app, but I should move away from it much earlier, because it just became so inaccurate I can no longer rely on it. I don't know if this is for my region only, or a country (Poland) or whatever, but if a forecast says it will rain for 7 days straight and there is no rain, but the rain falled immediately after forecast stopped showing any rain then it's worthless to use.

I don't know if Weather Kit will provide the same accuracy.

I'm in a process of switching to Open Weather Map right now, I started when apple announced Weather Kit to Dark Sky users via mail. But I will try this Norwegian API as well.

Same here. I have a weather station at home that publishes out to the internet and have used Dark Sky's API for years to display some maps on it. Now I have to switch to something. I live OpenWeatherMap, but going to check out the Norwegian API now.

I'm in NYC and I think Dark Sky has become more innaccurate. Don't know if it's truly gotten worse than before but there are plenty of times it's wrong on if it's going to rain. The funniest thing is it seems Siri still uses the Weather Channel data because my Dark Sky app is usually a bit different than if I ask Siri what the weather is like.

I've been using Dark Sky for years but I uninstalled it yesterday. Since the acquisition, the native Weather app has been massively upgraded with a lot of Dark Sky's best features and is very good now.

I ran the two in parallel for a few months to compare the alerts and accuracy. Weather won out.

Weird, because for me, in the UK, the weather radar is much, much lower resolution in the Weather app.

Dark Sky app however always had a longstanding bug that it’d never show past radar, only future sliding predictions, so I guess both have their problems.

I’m holding on a bit longer until Apple releases their app for the iPad. Until then, Dark Sky is probably still the best bet.

If you preferred Dark Sky before then what do you have against WeatherKit? Isn't it basically a repackaged Dark Sky for half the price?

Yr (Norwegian word meaning drizzle rain) is indeed truly excellent, but it should be noted that while its coverage is global, their forecasts outside of Europe are based on lower-accuracy models.

Do they actually do these forecasts themselves, aren't they cooperating with other meteorological agencies and sharing not only data but also forecasts?

My understanding is that those shared global models are of somewhat lower fidelity.

Free is always good but when it's fee you also get no guarantees and commitments. Apple and the free options probably target different segments.

Their weather app is also pretty good. It comes with an English language option.

iOS: https://apps.apple.com/jo/app/yr-no/id490989206 Android: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&hl=n...

Does the app provide anything valuable that you don't get with the website?

Does it have equally good data as WeatherKit? I vaguely remember that yr.no shows raw ECMWF data. WeatherKit probably provides weather.com data, which are postprocessed from ECMWF and perhaps other models and they provide the best forecasts.

The main issue with raw model data is that they are not adjusted for local altitude.

According to https://developer.apple.com/WeatherKit WeatheKit uses a forecast from Apple, and the data sources listed on https://WeatherKit.apple.com/legal-attribution.html don’t include The Weather Channel or weather.com.

Oh ok. So they're probably using the acquired DarkSky forecast.

It's what the GNOME weather applet uses. I thought it's weird it uses a Norwegian service for my UK weather, but makes sense now.

As a farmer in Australia, I use yr all the time as a alternate model to our BOM. It's proven to be very good for rainfall forecasts.

Thank you, Is this only forecast? Is there anything like this which provides reliable historical data?

I think weather underground did i.e. until Apple gulped it.

I've been searching for weather apps on Android since Apple acquired DarkSky, and eventually settled on Yr. Would recommend them.

Thank you, there are so many weather API, someone suggesting a good one helps.

Thank you!! That’s really cool!

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