Weather.gov 2.0 | Hacker News Reader

Weather.gov 2.0

github.com

355 pointsKoftaBob103 comments

Looks like this is being done under contract/partnership with 18F (GSA): https://18f.gsa.gov/

> The fundamental problem that we’ve observed is that weather.gov reflects its organizational silos (Conway's Law) more than its users’ needs. A lack of overall strategy, feedback/monitoring, and tools have perpetuated this problem.

Wow, my org would not have the guts to write that down in a public README!

US Digital Service and 18F have done a huge service by normalizing the ability for agencies to say, "Heh, this sucks, but we're going to make it better." That safety is half the battle, otherwise there is no incentive for stakeholders to put their guard down and collaborate on a cohesive solution ("bureaucracy hacking").

Building trust and relationships is an underrated component of these transformation efforts.

I wish more groups would be as transparent.

Silos happen. I'm not willing to spread blame. I will aside some of my frustration if I know it's an acknowledged problem and there's willingness to address it.

I've found the problem with transparency and any sort of acknowledgement of problems in business, is that there too many other people whoa are all too willing to say, "We're awesome, just leave it to us!" And these are usually the teams that have the biggest problems and rely on silos to prevent others from seeing how bad it is.

> feedback/monitoring

This makes me worried that they're going to add some "analytics" tracking scripts in there that come with those damned annoying cookie pop-ups.

They actually have an in-house solution for this: https://analytics.usa.gov/ (though based on Google Analytics)

Details here: https://digital.gov/guides/dap/common-questions-about-dap/

I go to weather.gov often and have actually filled out one of their pop up surveys. I suspect thats the feedback.

AFIAK, EU privacy law have provision for exemption to foreign governments bodies.

So, no cookie popup

It still seems like there is quite a bit of siloing, though. The Office of Water Prediction for example runs its own GitHub org, has its own sites separate from water.weather.gov at preview.water.noaa.gov and again at water.noaa.gov/map, but all their field observations actually come from the USGS who host data and web services at waterdata.usgs.gov.

Dumb question but is this 2.0 live somewhere I can use it or just source code in development?

I remember about 8 years ago there was an "experimental" site for one of the US government's aviation weather products. And it was so very good, designed modern and usable and clean. Didn't look at all like the usual awkward government website. The team seemed like nice folks too but were caught up in some multi-year government funding system. It eventually got shut down and IIRC, none of their work ever got promoted to the main site.

We are very lucky in the US to have a fantastic weather service and a mandate for their products to be free and public domain. Unfortunately there's also a lot of political pressure on them to not be too good so that some commercial company can profit. AccuWeather was one such company, at least back in 2005: https://www.onthecommons.org/privatizing-weather/index.html

Barry Myers / Accuweather would love nothing more than to privatize all weather forecasting services, which means I, and my colleagues at SPC, would be out of a job

Looks like they have staging environments set up but probably not live to the public:

https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/tree/main/.github...

Found it, it might not have much though. https://weathergov-staging.app.cloud.gov/

There is a beta website at beta.weather.gov but i am not sure if it's the same as the source linked in the post

The README says they’re done with prototyping and are now building the MVP.

Roadmap say May.

https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/blob/smh--researc...

You're doing great! radar.weather.gov is a terrific site, works on all devices, works extremely well and with zero Ads, please keep up the great work!

I've found it to be the exact opposite. It doesn't work well at all on mobile. It's overwhelmingly complex for anyone looking for something simple and useful like what was offered before. It's incredibly slow and has more limited useful information compared to its predecessor.

I wonder if this will impact api.weather.gov.. I hacked a little wunderground inspired dashboard a while back (https://weather.nikolaj.dev) that I still use most days.. but have stalled out a bit in rolling my own marine forecast for surf reports. Would love if they finally populated those fields (saves me figuring out the grib files)

I love this! Weather underground's 10 day forecast is my favorite UI/layout, but the ads haven gotten brutal.

Fwiw one of their architectural diagrams or api.weather.gov outside the scope of this project :)

I like the interface.

Nit: it redirected me to San Diego weather after a few seconds after I had already put in a different location. Maybe because I block the location request?

I wish there was a single place where all government related (open-source) projects are listed; maybe a usa-gov organization on GitHub where all repos can be easily accessible.

It's not exactly a single place, but this page [0] lists the Github organizations for many federal agencies. It's not comprehensive, notably it's missing the NSA organization [1].

[0] https://code.gov/agencies

[1] https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency

It's missing https://github.com/niaid/ and related NIAID repositories, too.

https://government.github.com/community/ also has international organisations

GitHub doesn’t really allow nested or even related organizations so it would be a nightmare to have all repos in a single org.

There is a GitHub for government [0] but it relies on contribs and isn’t very complete.

GSA started code.gov under the Obama administration with the aim to create a single index of all government projects. It withered under Trump and was basically defunded under Biden so they don’t really do much other than link out to major agencies and there’s no longer a requirement to timely index.

My org has like a 1000 repos and we’re one of hundreds of agencies so I can’t imagine collecting all these together without a little effort. The original code.gov worked pretty well as everyone just dropped a code.json file onto their web site and GSA scooped them up and combined them into a single. So it’s a real shame they stopped doing that, and stopped asking people to publish their code.jsons as it was a good idea.

[0] https://government.github.com/community/

I'm not trying to start trouble, but GitHub is not the only game in town and GitLab for sure allows nested groups, with their own permission structures, with the extra benefit that the government could host their own GitLab instance for extra benefits

Merely as a point of reference, https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories cites they currently have 6100 repos with another 2200 in /orgs/Azure so 10000 in an GH org wouldn't be unprecedented. I couldn't readily find any way to cough up their other top-level brands, and the "topics" seem to apply only to the repos themselves, not to the GH Organizations

I use gitlab as well and really like their groups feature.

My point stands though as it’s really impossible to try to standardize an organization as massive as a government into a single code management system, much less a single org, even if it has fantastic hierarchical management.

The government can host their own GitHub instance if they want to. I think the point is that there are probably thousands of “servers” with government repos. And consolidating to one “server” is a horrible idea.

A catalog is good though.

I occasionally help maintain [0] above, pull requests welcome at https://github.com/github/government.github.com

But for a universal (any host, any government) dataset contributing to wikidata would be helpful, and in the fullness of time I'd like to use that to cross-validate and identify missing entries https://github.com/github/government.github.com/issues/877 but the properties available probably need work to get there, right now there's e.g., https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1324 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2037 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8827

France has https://code.gouv.fr/, and sources are published on GitHub and SourceHut: https://github.com/codegouvfr https://git.sr.ht/~codegouvfr/

A vision of what the future could be for all of our federal agencies. Kudos to the National Weather Service for leading.

The weather.gov forecast graphs are the most useful ones I'm aware of and the ones I turn to first whenever I want to know about the weather.

Example: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.7771&lon=-1...

Yes, I have a window manager hotkey to pop up the hourly weather image for my location in mpv, I recommend this as a good way to get a quick look at the weather today or tomorrow. I also have a shell alias to use kitten icat to display it in the terminal, although I use the mpv hotkey more. I also have a text weather alias in the terminal that just calls curl on the file that matches my location under:

https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/zone/

I just looked through my state to find the right file but it looks like the "More Local Wx" link from the 7 day forcast page has the right name for the file (ORZ006 in my case).

I also have a few icat aliases to show radar; one for current, one for sequential, and one looping from this page (radar name same as on radar.weather.gov):

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/

However, I find the one hour accumulation view to be best and I couldn't find a way to get images for that view so I usually look at radar.weather.gov if it works (it has been working better lately but sometimes just doesn't work for me).

I haven't ended up looking at them often but I also made some icat aliases for 6-10 day and monthly temperature and precipitation outlook from:

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/610day/

https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/30day/

I see there is a contributing.MD file, but it’s hard for me to really tell how I can contribute. As a perspective contributor, it would be nice to know how best to contribute.

perspective (point of view) -> prospective (potential)

sharing in hopes it's helpful, not to be pedantic

Thank you honestly I’m just dictating to my phone today because I’m so under the weather. Toddler germs getting the best of me.

Something I was hoping to see is more about APIs for folks making their own specialized experiences. NOAA is doing a good job at raw data, but a lot of gov services consumption & utilization is more specific.

We are building some emergency management tools here (genAI first: continuous monitoring -> alerting, chatbots, tailored sitrep reports: feel free to reach out!), and as many agencies, utilities, etc, need specialized variants, I've come to appreciate the last mile data & UI difficulties that weather.gov must be solving internally and would benefit other agencies.

Weather.gov afaict is run by NWS under NOAA, so interesting it's not in the mission revamp here..

vaguely related, single most useful url on weather.gov imho, just change lat/lon

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?FcstType=graphical...

just wish it could do the same layout historically in the past

Too scientificy for my, I prefer https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.7771&lon=-1...

I’ve been using weather.gov as a no-BS site for getting local weather data that I knew would be stable (cough, DarkSky, cough). I’m a bit concerned that the ReadMe seems to only describe covering emergency events+broadcasting in 2.0. I could’ve missed it, but I hope porting over existing functionality is in scope after the MVP

I am a fan of the 2 day graphical forecast from NOAA, everything including dew point, cloud coverage, and wind speeds/direction on one screen and easy to understand the trend...

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=33.4503&lon=-1...

This new API coupled with their old API makes creating a DarkSky clone pretty simple. Here's mine: https://wthr.cloud/

I'll definitely end up using the broadcasting/eventing API for push notifications.

Very nice. Beats mine: https://emvee.rocks/weather.html

TypeError: undefined is not an object (evaluating 'hourly.periods.filter')

Stupid order of operations bug. A refresh should do it. Thanks for the nudge to fix this up.

Error: could not get location: [object GeolocationPositionError]

RangeError: date value is not finite in DateTimeFormat format()

Something went wrong

After Dark sky went I've been using https://merrysky.net/ and the pirateweather data it's based on seems pretty good.

Same, MerrySky been a very handy lens to view the data through. And, Pirate Weather has been a good, open source, drop in replacement for the parts of DarkSky I was using in Home Assistant.

> Our strategy for our Minimal Viable Product (MVP) is to make it easier to communicate forecasts and conditions for regular and hazardous weather in a way that anyone can find, understand, and use to take action.

I think they've got you covered. Maybe not directly porting over, but it sounds like they're aware of the non-emergency use cases.

Once you learn some of the weather terminology, your local NWS office’s AFD (area forecast discussion) is easily the most accurate, honest forecast you can find.

Unless you live in the Pacific Northwest, where they routinely screw up winter storms. Thankfully we have a couple of very competent meteorologists to keep us informed when it's needed most, otherwise the winter disaster scenarios would be much worse than it already is.

Are you talking about the local NWS offices in the PNW?

I always tell tech savvy people to look at the forecast discussion and not the infographics. For example, look at Spokane:

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=47.65726000000...

Then select 'Forecast Discussion' and read the discussions. They are usually updated a few times a day at the minimum, but during active weather events they are generally updated every 3 to 4 hours with new information (more data from the 850mb layer, for example).

I'm a fan, miss DarkSky though but weather.gov is far and above better than any commercialized weather site IMO.

Glad to see that they don't want to mandate it. The big radar update they did a few years ago was a disaster (slow, no easy deep links) that they have backed away from.

Backed away from? They never even fixed the 'lite' version so that you could actually use the radar images to predict when it will rain (the image is so tiny it's useless: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS_loop.gif). During the transition period years I must have sent a dozen emails to the noaa people asking them to please keep a simple animated radar image of CONUS available. It would be an easy thing. But they're absolutely dedicated to web application only access to weather data.

And the most frustrating thing is that the links to the https://radar.weather.gov/ 'lite' version are only visible if you sucessfully execute JS. So the no-JS version is invisible to no-JS browsers. Whoever they had designing this front end had never heard of graceful degredation, let alone progressive enhancement. It remains an accessibility nightmare.

Weather.gov 2.0 will be more of the same.

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/CONUS-LARGE_loop.gi... is quite a bit bigger.

I usually use the local radar gif though. My local office forecast pages link to the lite radars.

It's straightforward to take a peak at the available gifs:

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/

I'll be... the finally did it. Thanks for the update!

Thank you for starting the thread that eventually produced the answer I've been looking for this whole time.

And thank you for being persistent about raising awareness about how useful that national loop is.

Thank you!

> fixed the 'lite' version so that you could actually use the radar images to predict when it will rain ...

Those are the wrong links for that purpose. What you want is e.g.

https://radar.weather.gov/station/knkx/standard

Reach these by scrolling down your local forecast.weather.gov e.g.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=32.95528450000...

This is not what is wanted. What's wanted is the better options that previously existed. You've pointed to an often useless but in the best case substantially worse option.

This isn't difficult. Keep the better thing running and run the new showy thing in parallel for whomever wants that.

I don't get these criticisms, radar.weather.gov is phenomenally great! It works on all devices and doesn't show Ads. Maybe all these negative comments are people who work at accuweather or other for money weather sites trying to disparage radar.weather.gov with fabricated nonsensical garbage.

It's a degradation from what previously existed. We want the better thing that already existed, not this worse thing.

pre-Trump, knowledgeable netizens could access data directly, in large quantities since Federal data is already paid for by taxpayers. Things seem to have changed now that $MONEY is to be made in intermediating weather data feeds?

Try Nowcoast, radar with multiple layers of data...

https://nowcoast.noaa.gov/

That has all the things I don't like about https://radar.weather.gov/

The ridge gif loops load faster than the more complicated map starts to fill in...

I don't understand, I love radar.weather.gov. It's fast, works extremely well, lets me zoom in on an area even as it's animating, works great on Windows, Linux, Chrome on Android, what's not to like?

Even as it is animating?

The gif for an area covering a 2 hour drive in any direction loads in about a quarter second.

I probably got a little soured on it when they made it the primary path from forecast pages at a time when it was still quite slow.

It was a disaster because the incumbent administration was doing AccuWeather's bidding to starve it. The radar map dramatically improved after the transition to Biden.

Yes, the new radar ux was a disaster. Forced me to find another source.

Drupal. Interesting choice in 2024

Not really, most government websites use it. It’s still very popular.

Most? Source?

https://groups.drupal.org/government-sites

https://www.acquia.com/blog/drupal-for-government

https://www.drupal.org/industries/government

https://www.zyxware.com/article/6229/top-7-reasons-why-drupa...

https://www.drupal.org/openplus

https://www.applytosupply.digitalmarketplace.service.gov.uk/...

Now most may be a stretch, it's a hard metric to calculate without going around and counting every gov site. But for English speaking countries, it is very popular enough so that I'd say most gov/state/department websites are Drupal.

That and I am a Drupal consultant. So I may be biased.

Wheels remain an interesting choice in 2024 as well.

I agree. Unless Drupal redesigned their core, the way plugins and themes work is insecure by design. Similar to how software was back in the 80's where it was assumed no bad actors were running within the environment, and due to that assumption every single thing is available to be mucked with.

Is there a CMS with such an ability?

Plone was closest I saw, also run by several gov agencies, but drupal popularity won out to due to ease of staffing.

Yeah this is why you use a php platform like laravel which actually is engineered to build abd extend rather than say WordPress with an insane plugin system

Drupal is way more similar to Laravel these days (Drupal is now also built on top of Symfony) than WordPress.

> the way plugins and themes work is insecure by design.

Tell us more. (A lot more. "Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof".)

Anytime any plugin does anything, the submission of that "anything" into the Drupal subsystem proceeds to pass that plugin's payload to every single plugin in the system so they can make modifications. What those modifications are, you do not know, they are just applied and then your modified payload is accepted into the subsystem to modify whatever it modifies.

If you are installing rogue code then you will have a bad time.

Modules/themes on drupal.org which show "Stable releases for this project are covered by the security advisory policy" are written by trusted users. There is no other protection from rogue code because they are inherently able to access the database. It utterly doesn't matter what extension points the code supports and how because of that. In very broad strokes, if you are using any CMS which a) accesses a database b) allows installing additional code and it runs that in the same process as the CMS code accessing the database -- then you are vulnerable to rogue code. Like, a headless CMS where the frontend only talks to it via an API is protected from rogue code in the frontend part but that's about it.

This means the Drupal ecosystem is vulnerable to a supply chain attack, yes but ... um ... that doesn't make Drupal design insecure, does it?

Consider that often, far too often, a hierarchically senior non-tech individual mandates that various plugins be installed, without security checks or plugins that fail security checks, but that manager/c-suite individual demands the change. Far too often.

Most of the time they will go from drupal.org luckily there's very little else

And once again, what does rogue code has to do with Drupal? Nothing. The same would happen with almost any system. Name any CMS which is actually used in the wild and doesn't get compromised if you install rogue code right into the codebase.

You don’t have to use third-party plugins or themes though?

I mean if you built a site from scratch in Spring or Next.js and you start using third-party libraries or UI frameworks, all those third-party bits have full access to everything too.

See also https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31965812 "Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free weather API"

One wonders if there had been similar "How will we ultimately succeed or fail" manifests for the Boeing 737 Max and for Gemini.

For any corporation everything can be boiled down to: profit or loss?

Yep, for government agencies the mission is to actually do good useful things. That contrasts with for profit companies' missions of siphoning the most money out of customers' wallets into the bank accounts of wealthy execs and shareholders by doing the least work possible and abusing your employees as much as possible.

You can even see it in the mission statement in the link: >Because the mission and culture at NWS is built around serving, preparing, and protecting people, the site must do the same.

For Boeing it could be "door unhinges and blows away at 30K feet and no-one reports in media" For Gemini it would be everyone appreciate on how stunning and brave it is to deliver social justice.

> Everyone’s feedback has to be factored into the solution

This generally seems impossible, what if people have conflicting feedback?

thats what makes bureaucracies run (govt and big corps) - and why it is so frustrating if you come from a startup or small consultancy background to operate in huge bureaucracies - many folks in these big orgs only job is to sit in meetings and study things to death or else raise objections to theoretical problems that may never happen - in order to justify their existence, thinking that the more they study the problem, the better the solution will be - it usually does not end up with a better solution - just a late one, and more expensive and bloated.

> This has led to a disorganized repository of valuable information that external users struggle to use ...

Not my experience: forecast.weather.gov works just great for me as it is now.

Anyone else getting flashbacks of the Reddit/Gnome/KDE/... UI renovations?

Does anyone know where we can see the prototype? Is it a working prototype (is it this code?). Thanks!

I hope I don't cause someone's pager to go off on a Saturday by linking to a staging site from HN :pray:

Some other kind soul <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39574022> found the staging (and eric and greg, heh) manifests <https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/blob/6e98dcff73bc...>, which led to <https://weathergov-api-proxy.app.cloud.gov> which led to https://weathergov-design.app.cloud.gov/point/35.198/-111.65... containing the banner "This is a beta site. https://weather.gov/ remains the authoritative source of weather information." so chances are it's that

https://weathergov-staging.app.cloud.gov/point/35.198/-111.6... also works, but was slower. I didn't try eric or greg's copy :-P

Would be neat if this new site gives a bit more visibility to CWOP stations.

weather.gov is unironically one of my favorite websites, and I visit it almost every day. I am cautiously optimistic about this new version!

Is the data still coming from Raytheon?

“Weather.gov 2.0 will only succeed if everyone with NWS sees the site reflect their values, much like the agency”

“Strategy for prioritization: … Add complexity, ASAP”

I love the weather.gov website as it currently is. Can't wait for the new one to be bloated JS soup optimized for TikTok'ers.

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