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Comment by ace2358 | Hacker News Reader

It’s truly maddening as an Aussie. How many apps just ignore the BoM? I expected the Apple one not to, but it does. It’s frustrating when friends visit me and check the weather on their phone and the data for the Google and Apple apps is so bad.

I use Willy weather that uses bom. I don’t love it though. Any recommendations? I personally can’t stand the actual BoM app as an iPhone user but I appreciate that they tried…

R.I.P Pocket Weather :(

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I'm more of a desktop user, but I wasn't happy with what was out there so I made my own (but only for Melbourne): https://davidjohnstone.net/weather/melbourne . I'm tempted to turn it into a proper Australia-wide product. The BoM's data licensing fees (in the order of $5k/year) are a bit of a barrier.

That's really nice! Another commenter mentioned the Willy Weather API, which uses BOM data and has a generous free tier. Not sure if that would enable you to make it Australia Wide at a reasonable cost?

https://www.willyweather.com.au/info/api.html

BoM actually makes it quite difficult to obtain data. I looked into it once and thought it wasn't worth the trouble. Some agencies make it easier than others to obtain the raw data as it's sort of part of their mandates.

And they've made it even more difficult over the past few years. I had written a script that would scrape BoM's page and send the up-to-date conditions via MQTT but it stopped working a few years ago. IRIC, even changing the HTTP headers/user-agent prevented it from ever working again. That said, I understand it's absolutely their prerogative and they have a right to make money from the data.

> they have a right to make money from the data.

I thought it was a govt service. BOM is private?

You'll be surprised that the free-for-all-no-questions-asked US system is not the one followed around the world. Australia, like other countries with significant British history, has the concept of Crown Copyrights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Australia). Whether it's the (UK) Met Office (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/met-office-data-f...), (Australian) BoM (https://reg.bom.gov.au/business-solutions/) or (NZ) MetService (https://metraweather.com/), commercial use is paid-for. Personal use is implied to be free, but usually they interpret using their API to be commercial use.

That being said, and I agree with all points you raised, the Australian Gov has been fantastic over the last few years of focusing on open data, to give credit where it's due.

https://data.gov.au/search

Their datasets are great!

G-NAF for example: https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-19432f89-dc3a-4ef3-b943-5...

To be fair, from looking at the available datasets of different countries, it seems that weather data tends to be the one requiring business-level licensing. There are exceptions like Norway's Met (https://api.met.no/) and US' NOAA (too many to list), but unfortunately the usual answer for "weather data?" is "pay first".

Totally, there are full 3d scans of Launceston available. It's amazing what data you can access!

Quite correct- though the UK Met Office has a specific non-commercial API in DataPoint which is pretty good.

Oh, didn't knew about that despite checking out their website, but reviewing the licence you're correct in saying that commercial use requires payment.

I wish they used better open licensing. The public ftp has great free products, including fire danger ratings and observations, but the licensing mentions “Users intending to publish Bureau data should do so as Registered Users.” This costs a couple of grand and removes the barrier to a lot of potential great community apps being built.

I wonder if this isn't the same all over? In Sweden we also have a local metrology bureu which produces much better forecasts than most others. As I understand it they basically tweak the global models with .. sort of local "knowledge". And there are many such models, a few EU-specific and, I assume, one local for most countries.

Nate Silver's The Signal and the Noise's chapter about weather forecasting described forecasters during a visit doing that, a manual tweak essentially based on experienced intuition at the end that the models couldn't yet replicate.

This makes total sense for where I live too. A crowdsourced api of these adjustments would be neat.

> In Sweden we also have a local metrology bureu which produces much better forecasts than most others

Ironically Sweden’s best weather forecast comes from Norway [0]

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965812

About 10 years ago, I dropped into our local meteorology office on my lunch break to ask about the weather for a week long bush walk I had planned. It was amazing too see how much local knowledge the guy there could apply to the official BOM forecasts to make them more meaningful! Models are great, and have improved significantly since then, but human experience is also amazing!

Is metrology a typo, or are there countries that call it metrology instead of meteorology?

In the US metrology is a specific field dealing with measurement, often the department dealing with high precision calibrating/measuring tools in the metal machining industry.

> Any recommendations? I personally can’t stand the actual BoM app as an iPhone user but I appreciate that they tried…

Have you tried the official iOS BOM app in the past few weeks? I recently switched to it from Willy Weather as it has improved a lot. It's display of the next 90mins of modelled rain radar is the Official App's killer feature for me.

Last week it enabled me to drive 40mins to some mountain bike tracks, knowing rain models showed that the massive storm would have just passed by the time I'd get there.

I just bookmark the BOM forecast web page for my location. Does an app give anything better?

The latest version of the official app has 90mins of future "modeled" rain radar. I couldn't find that quickly on the website.

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