Weather Machine – Rock solid weather APIs with zero hassle | Hacker News Reader

Weather Machine – Rock solid weather APIs with zero hassle

weathermachine.io

85 pointsthecosas36 comments

It speaks poorly of an industry if there is a market for a toll gate to mush things into a common format.

It appears the plan with pricing doesn't include the weather data, just the transformation. You still need keys to the ultimate source.

I do feel the pain though. I moved to WeatherKit REST API when they stopped Dark Sky. The tiny amount of calls I make were free and easy in Dark Sky. In WeatherKit it is still free, but I had to figure out how to have my server generate JWT tokens which is a grade 2 pain in the ass on the 0 to 10 scale. (Also, the APIs are still marked as "beta". If you are killing a service and replacing it with a new one, maybe nail down that new one before cut over day? They are also sadly vague, the kind of stuff a programmer jots in because comments are required. If there is 3mm of rain followed by 50mm of snow, what does the precipitationAmount field have? The documentation says "The amount of precipitation forecasted to occur during the day, in millimeters.". Thanks, 12 words to tell me nothing. )

WeatherKit and Dark Sky just mush data provided by government sources across many countries into a common format.

Usually precipitation is whatever water came down in melted form. You have to calculate what that would be in snow. Which is not easy and only will give you a guesstimate.

> It speaks poorly of an industry if there is a market for a toll gate to mush things into a common format.

I can't think of a single industry I know of that has successfully merged their proprietary APIs.

And if I'm thinking a bit harder... Some of them did not even try.

Canadians, rejoice! Your tax payer dollars have afforded you a no-nonsense weather portal. Hourly projection, weather radar, jet stream, and satellite resources are all there, completely free, and often with an XML somewhere you can parse.

https://weather.gc.ca/canada_e.html

Let the Norwegian tax payer dollars (or, kroner, really) chime in![0]

[0] https://developer.yr.no/

The Australian BoM has it too: http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml

> The Bureau of Meteorology website does not currently support connections via HTTPS.

Not enough tax for a (free) certificate.

They have HTTPS for subscription services and media releases - everything else is free to air public data with anon FTP servers .. not a lot of HTTPS required for FTP.

And here's the swedish variety:

https://opendata.smhi.se/apidocs/

Is there an API, though? The Canadian sites do seem to provide data for those inclined to click and click and click, only to get a very thin slice in space/time/property. Without an API, this all seems to be an agency responding to a commandment from on high, as opposed to an agency that actually wants to share data in a helpful way.

Yes indeedy! [0] there are also RSS feed.

I can't say I feel the same way you do, however. I have two bookmarks and they are pretty great dashboards providing me with everything I need to know [1,2]

[0] https://eccc-msc.github.io/open-data/msc-geomet/readme_en/

[1] https://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/qc-147_metric_e.html

[2] https://weather.gc.ca/forecast/hourly/qc-147_metric_e.html

I find it curious that most weather services focus on weather predictions first, historical data second (or not at all). I am still looking out for a service that would provide historical data, allow me to update it on a daily basis (like, every night get yesterday's data for multiple locations), and have reasonable terms of service (not imposing prominently visible attributions). OK, reasonable pricing too.

For this one in particular, the terms of service aren’t clear in this regard (or I didn't find it).

> I find it curious that most weather services focus on weather predictions first

Why is that curious? Most people want an idea of what's going to happen to wear a sweater or bring an umbrella etc in the immediate future or maybe a week out for a vacation.

Because there are many use cases for historical data (algorithms' training or its cross-analysis with other data, for instance), while lots of APIs focus on forecasting. Maybe at this point we need more innovation in either the forecasting itself (generally "better" forecasts, especially for industries, and better extreme conditions alerting), or innovative use of historical weather data in other domains.

I'd argue that such information consumers are largely the same audience that wouldn't want to muck around with an API or remote service to begin with and aren't the target audience. When I check the forecast, I just use one of probably thousands of services that regurgitate and slightly alter NWS data. Just because I unlike most data consumers could read the data a different, more arcane way, doesn't mean I would (I absolutely wouldn't, I'm going to be lazy).

On the other hand, when I have been interested in lower level access to data and not just data products, the time I'm looking for data repositories and APIs to work with the data at a more detailed level, the time these sorts of services come into play, I'm very often (I'd say the majority of the time) quite interested in historical data. I want to look for trends, I want to look at how accurate forecast models were, I want to compare historic radar with forecast with a ground measurement station. For some I imagine they want to throw ML and other AI related techniques at it. Those are the exact times these sorts of services are useful to me, in my eyes.

So I agree with the obvious premise that most consumers of weather data just want to see immediate forecasts that effect their future, they care nothing about the past, I think those aren't the typical users of these types of services and were looking at two different user base targets.

Apple’s WeatherKit is actually pretty good at this. 500,000 requests free/month. Minimal attribution requirements.

This is a really cool example application of weather APIs: https://ismyweatherweird.com/

Cool page, metric units would be awesome.

This is cool on its own. But then I saw it was made by the folks at Hello Weather, a fantastically designed weather app that, as you might expect, lets you choose from several data providers. Even cooler that this is being done by folks who have already gotten their hands dirty with weather data.

I personally found https://github.com/davidtakac/prognoza an enjoyable and simple weather app for Android.

Its interesting seeing stuff like this. Makes me realize that I've never in my life thought of paying to know the weather. When I was younger I would just ask my parents, who watched enough news that they were abreast of the information. When I got my first phone, it just became available information for me at anytime.

I've definitely had strong opinions about which weather website provides the best user experience though. But I doubt those opinions were ever strong enough to make me consider paying for it

Wrong use case. It's an API to service businesses who require 1,000,000s requests a month. Its not made for individuals who just want to check the weather.

You might also like Pirate Weather, a free weather forecast API compatible with Dark Sky.

https://pirateweather.net/

It was posted on HN a few weeks ago.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34329988 (198 comments)

Why are there so many weather APIs? What's going on here?

I believe this burst of attention at weather APIs is from the impending shutdown of the Dark Sky API.

Is there a public authoritative weather data source all these weather APIs get there data from? Similar to how SEC.gov[1] is for financial disclosure data?

[1] https://www.sec.gov/os/accessing-edgar-data

The NWS provides a lot of this, although maybe not all:

https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api

Thanks for this, just spent a week playing with their older xml api and that looks really developer friendly in comparison.

Older api: https://graphical.weather.gov/xml/

Around the world, weather observation and data collection is in most cases a public service provided by the government. The accessible data weather bureau's provide is also unique and country specific.

Well theres lots of weather isn't there.

I thought the "rock solid" weather api was a humorous reference to something like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_rock

I wish more weather APIs would provide websocket streams. I think it would be cool for running things against weather data in "real time" vs being rate limited by a REST API.

This is real weather: https://www.taps-aff.co.uk/

Oh, nice! Will take note for a new project. Using openweathermap right now.

> zero hassle

I click!

> Sign up for early access

I close tab :/

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