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Comment by zie | Hacker News Reader

According to your link it's missing 2 things, and I would argue neither are true.

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",

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The icon field is deprecated, no longer documented in the API, and also more complicated in practice, as it can mix multiple conditions, e.g. `...{day,night}/rain,30/snow,60?...`. The space of possible icons is also fairly large -- https://www.weather.gov/forecast-icons to get an idea -- and it's not clear what short string they all map to. So yeah, in theory you could parse and infer a weather condition out of that link, but as you can see it's pretty hacky and already deprecated. The API should really just return a code or enum (e.g. like a WMO code).

But maybe there's a cleaner way to infer it. PRs are always welcome.

There's also "shortForecast": "Partly Sunny"

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!

They're deprecated under the "Specification" tab: the `/icons/...` endpoints in the endpoint list, and the `icon` field in the `GridpointForecast` schema. The `shortForecast` field is documented as `A brief textual forecast summary` and not exhaustively enumerated, so it's also technically not machine readable. If it's anything like the icons, there could potentially be 50+ of these. I really couldn't find anything resembling an overall conditions enum or code anywhere, but I'd be happy to be wrong.

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.

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