Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs
briefsky.app
briefsky.app
I do wish I could make my own graphs but parsing all the different weather models is a pain, maybe there's some API I don't know about or an open source consistent parser
https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/meteogramweb/t...
When I look at science data I don't look at lists of numbers, I don't know why that's always how weather is presented visually
That said.. Windy's precipitation forecast figures haven't always been great around here.
I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so significant that it has impacted my overall quality of life.
Edit: You can also click on the "pressure" widget and it brings up the same hour-by-hour detail view.
Darksky used to make that really easy to check for the entire day and I'm not loving Weather as a replacement.
Meanwhile Weather app completely missed the point and gives me a bunch of stuff I don't care about.
You can tell me that the wind at 4 PM is going to be 5 MPH west northwest but you can't tell me there's a 30% chance of rain? Gee that's great, thanks for shutting down Dark Sky!
I've been enjoying https://www.meteoblue.com/ and if you scroll down you'll get a precipition map there.
Anecdotally my headaches correlate with weather changes but was never able to pinpoint exactly the markers.
I did debate writing how 'headache'y I felt periodically with timestamps (e.g. make a telegram bot -> google sheet) and then add in some weather data and see if it was actually correlated if I plotted them
I can usually tell by intuition if weather is going to trigger things — I’ll even say, “it feels migrainey out” — but I don’t have one specific weather pattern that is clearly the cause.
That’s why I pay attention to the barometer. The barometer frequently predicts big, nonspecific weather changes so whenever I see one on the horizon I know that I might get a migraine when that happens.
Regarding preparation, I try to get stuff down so I can take it easy around the time when the pressure is shifting.
For example, later this afternoon the pressure is supposed to climb quite a bit so I’m getting critical blockers for work done this morning and then I’m going to visit the gym at lunch. It really helps my stress level if I can finish my plan for the day before a headache puts me out. I hope that makes some sense?
https://community.windy.com/topic/14827/how-to-read-meteogra...
https://barometricpressure.today/
It’s currently tracking a lot of cities, so please check if you’re close to any, otherwise, I will soon add a search for specific locations.
I’m open to any feedback.
I think Carrot weather also has that feature
Now I have two that look great on the Desktop and easy on the eyes (ie; without the chaos I find on other sites):
https://merrysky.net/ and https://briefsky.app/
Only tested on the Desktop but I'm finding I have to do a bit more work (vs MerrySky) - that is, I have to keep clicking each day.
Usability could be improved if today's weather information bar automatically displayed when accessing the page. Maybe the settings could add a toggle ON option for:
(-) today only
(-) all days
I'm trying to figure out a good way to add 60-min forecast (precipitation in next hour.)
Clicking the large temperature (in landscape mode) toggles between F/C. I think precipitation is always in mm, except for the short text summaries.
...but yes, making the units configurable was already requested and is planned in the rewrite.
I never understood why people go through all these other API's that consistently get shut down, cancelled or become pay for use eventually.
See here for notes on other unsupported providers: https://github.com/vsergeev/briefsky#unsupported-providers
Sunrise/sunset data can be calculate yourself: https://gml.noaa.gov/grad/solcalc/calcdetails.html
As for the code/icons, there is indeed an 'icon' in the hourly forecast, for example:
From this url: https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/PDT/31,35/forecast/hourly which returns an hourly forecast for someplace or other, there is this:
"icon": "https://api.weather.gov/icons/land/night/snow,20?size=small",
But maybe there's a cleaner way to infer it. PRs are always welcome.
I don't know why you think it's deprecated? I don't see that anywhere. They just updated the icons in 2015, which for govt API work is practically yesterday :)
I think it's just that the specifications document, like basically all documentation is out-dated. There are many fields in the output that are not in the documented spec.
My weather needs just call directly to api.weather.gov and have done so reliably for a year or two now, whenever the last API I was using started charging or broke or whatever happened to it(I don't even remember what API it was at this point). So I have no need of your project, but I wish you lots of success!
In the meanwhile, I could try to get it working with nearly everything else and try to find a last minute hack for the icons.
Which is really disappointing, since the weather models they use must model the entire world...
I would never expect a govt to provide global weather forecasts for places outside their jurisdiction. Though now I wonder is the US govt one provides weather for the US territories and other US places outside the 50 states. I don't have time to play with that at the moment, sadly.
For the others, I tried to document the main limitations here: https://github.com/vsergeev/briefsky#unsupported-providers
Personally, I've found weather.gov APIs hard to work with. There's no geocoding included, and you can't even use lat, lon directly. But the bigger dealbreaker is that I have about a ~10-20% success rate querying any given endpoint, where sometimes I just get "An unexpected problem has occurred." And this is an automated twice-a-day query, so I don't think I'm hitting any rate limits...
It collects raw weather mode data and redistributes weather forecasts with simple APIs
Briefsky is also using it :)
The US provides free updated every 15 minute forecast for an absurd number of weather variables for every 3km square of the US in a nice GRIB file package. It is the gold standard on the free domain. Want a real api? Be prepared to pay real money. All Darksky did on top of this was interpolate that forecast data across time and the map.
Without an actual meteorologist on hand to guide the process, the forecast is probably going to be bad. NOAA and the weather community are just fine with the bar being high for entry. A proliferation of low effort/poor forecast web sites would just lead to them removing the realtime data from the public domain.
They make it all available at https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets, but as noted - since the data is so incredibly large and NOAAs already running stats on it... you can't really outcompute them.
[There are very very few CS applications with both a) more computing power and b) more real world impact than predicting weather and hurricanes. Maybe cancer research.]
20TB source: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/data-dive-five-noaa-databas...
Small feature request; when I paste in from Google's "copy coordinates" feature, it could detect my paste contents are "coord,coord" and populate the form appropriately, splitting on the ",".
- https://openweathermap.org/api/geocoding-api
I'm using the openweathermap geocoding API for https://uw.leftium.com/ (IP address -> lat/long -> location)
Source code: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather/blob/0f4ea58d2603f4...
To me, that means I prefer English UI text but it doesn’t suddenly mean I want my units in arms and ounces and firestoves or whatever weird shit you Anglosaxons do :-)
I recognize that formally this is me breaking the locale model, but if so, then that’s a flaw in the design of locales and not a flaw in me. At the risk of ranting a bit, the idea that I can’t have a Color Picker named “Color Picker” without also bending over and accepting Fahrenheit is just weird to me. Lumping all this stuff together (don’t get me started on number formatting!) into a single 5-character language-and-region code is just dumb. The model assumes one dimensional einheitswurst humans who do as they’re told in primary school, never move away from their home town and never learn a second language. It sucks.
Let’s be happy so many websites get this right and treat locale as a language selector only.
(Meta sidenote, “Einheitswurst”, literally “unit sausage” but kinda also “unity sausage” which gives this word for dullness a delightful political angle, has got to be the second-best word in the German language)
1. The Example Weather Provider notification keeps popping up every time I refresh. It doesnt remember that I already closed it the last time
2. For some reason, on my phone it thinks that today is Saturday (today is Monday where I am) and its giving me the upcoming weeks weather starting with Sunday.
One nitpick - with Geolocation option, if it is disabled at the browser level (all fields are greyed out), the app shows some forecast, but it's not clear for what location.
An idea - allow enabling multiple providers at once, have the app automatically validate their forecasts against the actual conditions and then, basically, rank them on accuracy. In theory this should allow determining providers that are good at forecasting for one's specific location.
Don't forget the clock, too. It's not quite as odd to use am/pm as it is to use imperial units, but it's still the wrong choice for all of Europe minus U.K.
I was actually hoping to make NWS the default for US, but ran into some limitations with their API missing machine readable conditions codes/icons. Open-Meteo does have https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/gfs-api, which should probably be used in the meanwhile for a better default forecast with US locations.
When I checked the other day, it looked like Pirate Weather was still waiting on donations to fund the development work for that feature.
The way I use it is as a bookmark with a pre-configured provider and the location in the title. briefsky stores all configuration in the URL, so you can bookmark multiple locations / providers.