Visualising weather reports as a graph | Hacker News Reader

Visualising weather reports as a graph

weatherspark.com

98 pointsarb9925 comments

I really like the way that the Norwegian site yr.no does this:

http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/California/San_Francisc...

Nice and simple, without any fancy Flash/animation going on. Take a look at the "Detailed" view to see pressure and cloud cover on the same graph.

Compare the two of them, and I find this much more readable.

I like the layout of yr.no better too. Unfortunately it is only in Celsius so not as useful for me...

Thanks! I'm a sysadmin at met.no, and will forward your comments to the devs.

I found the OP solution interesting in regards to visualizing historical observations. As of now, we have a system seperate from yr.no for that (but I believe it is still accessible from api.met.no).

Great work on the graphics - concise and informative.

Coverage in western Europe for wind speed and pressure on the advanced map is limited to the North Sea, and Northeastern Atlantic. Is this due to limited access to the data or because Scandanavians think that it is always sunny and warm in Iberia so the weather is not worth reporting.

Our primary sector is the Northern Atlantic and the North Sea from Faroe Islands/Iceland and up to and including the Arctic. We do those calculations based on observations from several sources (like weather stations, weather balloons and satellite imagery) that we feed into our meteorological and oceanographic models. The stuff we create for our sector are in principle always made public, and you'll see those products on yr.no and on the API.

We also retrieve and use observations and products from partner institutions like NOAA (US) and the ECMWF (EU). Some of the partners (mostly national services) do not accept redistribution, so some areas might unfortunately only have basic meteorological and oceanographic data made available on our API.

It's amazing how popular yr.no has become. We got word from some South African farmers who said they were using yr.no instead of their national service, as our service was of better use for them. (The distance between Oslo and Johannesburg is 6010 miles.)

I also like yr.no and the hour by hour view it provides. As many other Swedes I use it every day. A plus for yr.no is all the free data that is available! Probably the best weather site there is, if you're in a northern Europe country at least. http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

We've got a simplified version that's html-only in the pipeline, should be out "any day now", so do check back.

(disclosure: I'm one of the devs on the site)

I found yr.no visually appealing and easier on the eyes, but I found WeatherSpark more informative. WeatherSpark allows me to put other stuff on the graph, such as humidity. If there's an option to do that at yr.no, I missed. I also prefer being able to see the exact values right there on the graph, instead of having to look them up in a table. Just my personal preferences.

I use this service all the time since I found out about it last year (on HN) because it gives me more information than I will ever need and still makes it easy to consume. The most unique aspect of this implementation is the historical data they provide to give you an idea of weather even when there is no forecast. This is unbelievably valuable when planning a trip to a new region of the world and I routinely use it to plot my locations and timing accordingly.

The only real problem I have with this site is the heavy dependence on flash, and a few clunky UI controls when interacting with the graph over a long period of time.

We recently added some very simple keyboard controls: the arrow keys (left-right: pan, up-down: zoom), that might alleviate that problem a little.

Yes, you need to click in the app once to give it focus before it registers the keyboard clicks. Just one of the many little gotchas with flash... (don't get me started ;)

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

  Loading Google Maps plugin... 

  If you're using HTTPS Everywhere please disable it for 
  GoogleMaps since it makes the authorization request fail. 
  Tools Menu -> Add Ons -> HTTPS Everywhere Options -> Search 
  for 'GoogleMaps' -> Click on the green check mark to turn 
  it into a red x.

Is this a problem with the google maps 'plugin' or their implementation?

The authorization request that the google maps flash SDK issues to google fails when it's issued as an https request. The HTTPS everywhere plugin forcibly changes the request type, thereby making it fail.

AFAIK there's no way to fix it on our side.

(I'm one of the devs on weatherspark)

Just to throw this out there, most of this is already presented directly by the National Weather Service: http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.73285&lo...

... and most computer languages are turing equivalent, yet people prefer different ones ;)

Seriously, yes, all the data is freely available in some combination of text and graphics on the internets - the pitch here is the presentation, aggregation and ease of exploration.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330429

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310535

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3094357

Very cool, wish I had known about this before I built my own. Of course, building my own let me tailor it to the data and style I wanted (http://dustytome.net/demos/widg/).

As a side note: is there any place to get free(ish) weather forecasts? I've been using Wunderground's API (which is nice), but I don't see any way to let multiple people use it without shelling out more money than I can justify at the moment.

NOAA has an api ( http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=San+Franci... click on the red XML button down right on the page)

As someone else mentioned, so does api.met.no (they power yr.no).

World Weather Online and Weather Central are commercial offerings, but reasonably priced.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

Would be cool if you changed Europe/Vilnius shortcut to Lithuania with capital Vilnius and not Vilniusstrasse in Austria :)

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=Europe/Vilnius

suggesting to replace it with: http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;ws=29009

By the way I really like viewing weather as graph! Nicely done.

Yes, yahoo's geocoding is not perfect... Searching for just "Vilnius" does the right thing though, and takes you to:

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=Republic_of_Lithuania/...

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

I really wish the terms 'chart' and 'graph' were not used synonymously.

Very similar to the My-Cast Weather app in horizontal orientation.

flash? try again please.

if it's not HTML5 you're not interested?

I hear you about flash, HTML-only "simple forecast" is in the pipeline, so do check back.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

I like it.

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