Own a weather station? We want your data
weather.gov
weather.gov
For context:
The governments of the world provides these big weather companies (weather.com (cough IBM), Accuweather (cough IBM cough), etc) a metric shit ton of their data completely for free (by law) including data transfer. These are things like radar, satellite, ground station data, forecasts, composite models, etc. These companies profit substantially on it, as in billions of dollars. You as citizens also can get this data completely for free as well! MADIS is a system the government is working on to make that data access easier by bringing together many of these systems together and removing the bureaucratic redundancy and abstracting out the aging infrastructure. This is literally terabytes of data per day you can grab with almost no questions asked. That data is then processed privately and resold and repackaged to the end user, and you probably interact with this privatized data the most.
The frustration I have much of the additional "value" these weather data brokers provide is by linking up with each other with data contracts. These private companies have a much much higher detail on the ground than the government by being able to partner with companies that make common internet-connected personal radar stations and reselling that data to each other. The government doesn't have that privilege to buy limitless data. NOAA/NWS, for example, is extremely underfunded so if they had to privilege to buy it they probably couldn't come to an agreement to buy it. As a result, they can't use that data to improve the accuracy of alerts/warnings/forcasts, the same exact tools that the big weather companies make all their money from. It's a shit cycle and totally unfair IMO.
So please contribute if you can!!
Sidebar: I'm a founder of a self-bootstrapped startup to build a better weather data broker that doesn't cost an arm and a leg. If that's something you are passionate about solving, feel free to reach out :)
Weather Company was sold for $2B to IBM in 2015 (and recently sold to private equity for undisclosed amount). Tomorrow.IO has a $1B+ valuation pre-IPO SPAC.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/johnkoetsier/2021/04/08/ibms-we...
P.S. It's easy find online versions of the reports that pilots get over the radio. Here's an example with explanation for Boston Logan International, USA: https://aviationweather.gov/data/metar/?id=KBOS&hours=0&deco...
Is there a Foss server around that I can set up on my own ?
Didn't IBM sell weather.com (and all of the assets) to a private equity? The deal was announced last year and closed in Feb 2024
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/francisco-partners-completes-...
Just opening weather.com will send almost 1000 requests , transfer 10.3MB. Every 30 seconds or so it will make about 300 requests + 2MB of transfer for new ads. It's... insane
AccuWeather, a corporation like any other is made of people. These shortsighted decisions and shitty behavior are directly attributable to people who do them for selfish reasons.
So let's start talking about these people in the first person, not in the abstract.
Who is directly responsible for these atrocious actions and why do they stand to benefit from them?
Here are two: Rick Santorum and Jim Bridenstine.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/capital-weather-gang/wp/...
https://weather.gc.ca/city/pages/on-118_metric_e.html
and any info from Environment Canada, being packaged in a way that might compete, with the very same people using Environment Canada's free data for-profit.
Cries of "How can the Government compete with the private sector" are thrown around, always glossing over how that very data is often sourced from the Government. Pathetic. Leeches of the worst kind.
[0]: <http://www.findu.com/>
I haven't heard of personal radar stations, and wasn't hitting anything in a quick web search. Are you able to provide an example of these systems?
For reference, a weather radar operates in Doppler mode with return signal coming from Rayleigh scattering of raindrops, so it's on the 3cm - 10cm wavelength. You are talking about something like a 5 meter diameter antenna dish that weighs half a tonne, which is on an elevation-azimuth motorized mount, in a 7 meter diameter radome, with peak transmit power of 250 000 W.
Of course you can buy one yourself, if you have the space, electrical power and money for it - ballpark 1.5 mill. USD.
https://www.furuno.com/files/Brochure/448/upload/WR110_EN.pd...
That said, I'd guess $10,000 US < price < $50,000 US for that product given the pricing of $8K US for smaller commercial fishing radars from the same company.
More on the two compact weather radar systems: https://www.furuno.com/en/systems/meteorological-monitoring/
There's another recent peer comment that confirms 1.5 million US for a large 250kW is a pulse power for a C-band stationary radar system with 300 km of range.
This is a small doppler with modest power and 70 km range max.
If cost is proportional to the 3D volume of space scanned (as the power requirements likely are) Then this small mini radar might well be less than 100K.
TBH I have no specific knowledge here although I have worked in other sensing domains and seen a wide spread on cost of equipment related to volume and quality of data.
I'd be interested in the flat cost price of the mini system, I suspect that's not going to appear without some inside knowledge or working a dealer, it appears to be a rare bespoke kinf of thing, not like the commercial fishing radars.
C-band weather radars existed since forever, first using magnetron transmitters and now solid-state amplifiers, though there are still a lot of new magnetron-based systems being installed, with the downside that magnetron pulses are practically impossible to modulate to perform advanced radar techniques that improve different aspects performance. There are also X-band weather radars, which operate on higher frequencies and use more modestly sized antennas (but still larger than you'd like to have on your house roof). They are more limited in range (100km-ish max) due to high attenuation and mostly used at airports, offshore oil rigs and windfarms and similar installations that mostly interested in precise local weather. They are still several hundred thousand bucks.
There, selecting 'Weather Prediction Center' goes to https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/#page=ovw
There I searched in 'Local forecast' for cities and see most of what 'weather com' delivers, with 3 domains in Noscript instead of the couple-dozen from weather.com
This is the Norwegian government weather service. It's global and free for everyone. Also has fully open apis
It is incredibly fast, no bloat, no ads.
Just not as accurate as a local service as their main focus is - norway.
So they do provide a public service, even if maybe they get too much money from it.
As consumers and creators of plenty of weather data you might see a fair bit of traction there!
Would love to hear more about this. I’m a researcher and a lot of my work revolves around machine learning applications to building energy modeling, and one of my projects actually revolves around the difference between using TMY vs AMY EPW files in automatic calibration of models. Would be great to chat more. What’s the name of your startup? I can shoot you an email at the official email.
NOAA has already made some contracts with Spire [1] and Saildrone [2]. I am sure there are more but these are the ones most familiar to me.
Your weather data broker startup sounds very interesting!
[1]: https://spire.com/press-release/spire-global-awarded-nationa... [2]: https://research.noaa.gov/2022/08/03/noaa-and-saildrone-team...
The private sector has really embellished its capabilities to the detriment of the CDP and other programs. I think too many industry players saw NOAA's expansion here as a potential slush fund to fully subsidize their R&D, but again the TRL of planned observation systems was too low and so the system didn't really work efficiently. Classic policy failure - would make a fantastic case study or Master's thesis for someone studying weather in an STS program!
[1]: https://www.space.commerce.gov/business-with-noaa/commercial...
They get input from e.g. NOAA (US), DWD (DE), YR (NO) and so on.
I'm not affiliated, just needed some historical data and (finally!) discovered them.
If I may ask a question, do you have historical air quality data?
My hobby will include a C band antenna this fall, and I’m on the hunt for radar data sources in which to create my own mosaics.
As my own sidebar, I spent many years at a national lab working with distributed sensor networks (primarily ATC and other radar for detecting non-weather stuff :) ). I thought about using ADS-B as input for weather state and forecasts, but never got around to trying it. Now that I am working on my own startup (self-funded and without revenue so far), so this again will likely languish in my todo list. If someone wants to try it, great, and feel free to reach out as I can probably save you some time selecting and interpreting the right ADS-B fields:
We have a lot of aircraft blasting ADS-B reports whenever they fly. Most reports contain (1) accurate 3D position, including altitude and (2) barometric altitude measurements, which gives you (after some minimal work) air pressure. So you have millions freely available pressure reports not just on the ground, but throughout 0-40000 ft altitude band.
You also get measured airspeed and groundspeed, so in addition to pressure you get wind vectors at thousands of points in the air, updating in real time. I suspect this can provide some non-trivial information and I am not aware of anyone actually using it for this purpose.
These data are a very important input for operational weather forecasting. On a global basis, we've seen how losing these data during the pandemic due to reductions in air travel decreased forecast model skill [2]. Furthermore, ACARS profiles derived from aircraft landing at airports where severe weather is expected are regularly used to complement SPECI weather balloon launches.
[1]: https://community.wmo.int/en/activity-areas/aircraft-based-o... [2]: https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/apme/59/11/JAMC-D...
For specific ADS-B fields, ADS-B exchange used to have a great data fields overview. ICAO should have a spec, too.
These companies are already receiving government data for free. And then enriching it with private weather station data (and ads). So your taxes are already funding some part of it.
As computing power being used for forecasting increases (14.5 petaflops each for both Dogwood and Cactus NOAA supercomputers), having more granular data is going to be useful in improving their models.
https://www.noaa.gov/news-release/noaa-completes-upgrade-to-...
It's "free" in the worst sense of the word.
All the plots and features seemed nice so I paid for a year of subscription (after Dark Sky was discontinued ugh), but if they do that I’ll just stick to the default apple Weather app.
Huh? This is kind of an odd take for a few reasons. For starters, NOAA isn't "extremely underfunded"; with the possible exception of the current budgeting cycle, NOAA generally does pretty well and has strong bipartisan support. It could always use more money, but I wouldn't call it "underfunded.
The reason NOAA doesn't buy more data is because most of the available data has limited value. Personal weather stations have substantial quality issues and add almost no value in areas where we already have high-quality surface observations. We thin out and throw away a ton of surface observations already during the data assimilation process to initialize our forecast models anyways - data from aloft is far more valuable and impactful from a forecast impact perspective.
For what it's worth, few if any companies use proprietary observations to improve their forecasts. It's an open secret that the vast majority of companies out there are just applying proprietary statistical modeling / bias correction on top of publicly available data. Only a handful of companies actually have novel observations, and there's limited evidence it makes a significant difference in the forecast. At best, it can result in the way that those statistical corrections are applied to existing forecasts and ensembles - you can count on one hand the number of companies that actually run a vertically-integrated stack including data assimilation of proprietary observations and end-to-end numerical modeling.
That isn't to say there isn't unique value in the observations. It's just that the industry flagrantly misleads about how they use them.
More importantly, NOAA explicitly funds the National Mesonet Program [1] to actively identify, acquire, consume, and ingest data from a wide variety of state and federal agencies across the country. The NMP itself partners with a major private sector company, Synoptic Data PBC [2] to perform the engineering necessary to acquire all this data. Synoptic actively maintains the infrastructure which consumes and publishes this data to MADIS for use by NOAA and any other stakeholder.
[1]: https://nationalmesonet.us/ [2]: https://synopticdata.com/
I'm very interested to see how the ML modeling revolution changes this. The ability to perform global forecasts on a single GPU should make it cost competitive for more companies. I know several companies are already deriving their own weights for the forecasting component so that they can sell them. Google appears to be working on the next piece of the puzzle too with using ML for the data assimilation step, or skipping that altogether and using observations to go directly to forecasts.
I regularly notice that the NWS forecasts, even in the very short term, get the surface conditions rather wrong. (This is by comparison to a an inadvertent but, I think, quite accurate surface temperature and humidity measurement that I have.)
I fully believe that the measurements aloft do a great job of predicting the conditions aloft, but I wonder whether the results would be further improved by even a fairly simple model to map the forecast results back to detailed surface conditions. After all, many of consumers of weather forecasts, e.g. people caring about personal comfort, climate control energy predictions and pre-heating/pre-cooling of buildings, etc. care about surface conditions more than they care about conditions aloft.
Observations for the surface don't have this effect for two reasons: (1) they can be dominated by local influences (like local topography) that poorly constrain the background atmospheric state, and (2) the majority of numerical weather models do not directly model the planetary boundary layer (the layer of the atmosphere closest to the ground), and instead parameterize processes that occur here. What this means, practically, is that the information content of surface observations is low (1), and even when it isn't, there isn't a mechanism to effectively propagate this information outside of a single grid cell or even column in the actual forecast model (2).
That's why observations are typically used to bias-correct forecast models - it's a form of localization or downscaling.
I use this and love it.
Unbelievable.
I think someone spilled idiot juice in the water.
Michael Lewis' book The Fifth Risk goes IN DEPTH into how Accuweather/Weather.com and the government were interacting (particularly during the Trump administration).
I highly recommend the book in general and for this particular story in particular.
Thanks!
P.S.: I'm passionate about air quality, given I have alergies and was an active member of the bicycle activism movement for about 10 years.
Nobody wants the data, sadly - there used to be a national monitoring system on rivers up and down the country, but after 2008 it was abandoned, and now there’s only limited monitoring of major rivers, and none of tributaries. The IPMA and APA eventually responded and said thanks for your interest, but we have no means to ingest third party data.
I wish it could be useful for someone other than myself - but short of building my own platform and ingesting the APA’s copyrighted data, it ain’t happening.
It's scary how easily this happens. Even America briefly reduced funding to the USGS during the Trump years, among other agencies that saw budgets cut for anything that collects data on the environment. The impact was immediate and now certain important time series including stream gauges and ground water levels have years of missing data because those programs were shut down.
I want your API to not return 500 errors for hours at a time, multiple times a day...
Today it was down from 9AM to 2PM, and then from 9:30PM to 11PM.
Yesterday was even worse.
It isn't rate throttling because I only try to retrieve current conditions every 30 minutes.
Also, the load of the API might be a lot lower if it were possible to retrieve just the current measurements, but the response you get back for observations is insanely bloated with 12 hours back of each measurement, plus a bunch of station information that is heavily duplicative of information provided about the station.
Nothing about the station should be returned when you ask for the station's measurements should be returned except a link to API call for the station's information.
Strange that they have outage information via radio. What endpoints were failing? I'll email and see if they'll accept some help.
* First, take an excellent Government service and under-fund it by reducing its budget or hobbling it in some capacity
* Ensure that the prior does not cut the budget in half, or something so overt. If you do that, your political adversaries will surely drum up support to stop you. Instead just never increase the budget. Let aging infrastructure go unfunded for upgrades and improvements, etc. Small, non-apparent cuts.
* Next, put someone in charge who ensures that the service is eating money, yet its output is useless for most tasks, and unreliable.
* Later, complain how the service is clearly not useful, yet "look at all this money the taxpayer pays!!", and suggest changing its scope so that it better aligns with "others providing the same service". Key to this is that you didn't cut the budget extensively, so the service is indeed very expensive without value.
* Either dismantle the service entirely, or turn it into a shadow of its former self
This is an ongoing game. There are those that literally go bananas, at the idea of anything, anything at all being done by Government.
It is ridiculously easy to keep services up, if you're even mildly competent, and just handle things with the correct process. Process is vital here, key, how you develop services, and how you deploy and monitor and maintain them, is key.
The fact that stuff "just goes down" repeatedly means that they literally have no idea what they're doing.
And I suspect that's on purpose.
EDIT: sorry, I misread your commend. If it's only once every 30 secs, that may be a bit overkill for your needs. You may be able to get the appropriate text product directly and parse it out. Unfortunately probably the most stable, yet clunkiest, way
/stations/{stationId}/observations/latest ?
The problem however, is the 500 or target station readings returning null.
Normally those would be posted on https://www.weather.gov/notification/ but that’s having hiccups, but the email list for announcements still works.
A few of the recent announcements: - https://www.weather.gov/media/notification/pdf_2023_24/scn24... - https://www.weather.gov/media/notification/pdf_2023_24/scn24... - https://www.weather.gov/media/notification/pdf_2023_24/scn24...
But like so many they turned commercial and kicked off all the hobbyists that made them big. It was a really nasty move. I have never found a suitable replacement. I don't know what it is about weather that gives people so much greed.
Yes, their acquisition by IBM really messed things up. I went from totally loving the app to uninstalling it and never looking back.
Definitely going to feed my local data to weather.gov.
The only "bad" thing Weather Underground did was they ended their free API for non-contributors. [1]
I believe personal weather station contributors still get free access to a different API that wunderground moved to. [2][3]
[2] https://docs.google.com/document/d/1eKCnKXI9xnoMGRRzOL1xPCBi...
[3] https://github.com/cytech/Home-Assistant-wundergroundpws/?ta...
It was a wonderful community-driven service and they basically canned the whole community, and moved to focus on commercial users. I think that's very bad. Even the site is totally useless now. Only crap news and some basic weather reports but it's very hard to find anything community generated.
What's worst though is that no alternative emerged. I had expected that to happen. It's sad that community alternatives always end up selling out. The same with ADS-B Explorer.
* https://ambientweather.com/ws-5000-ultrasonic-smart-weather-...
There are much cheaper options than that one if you're interested in hosting a weather station. I decided to install it since I live in a relatively rural area and there is a fairly large gap in coverage where I live. Now I can get more local data and my neighbors can benefit as well. If you live in an urban area odds are a lot of the stations you see on the coverage map are just like this. When I lived in Austin I had a lot nearby readings and if you dig into the info tab for each one you'll see they're personal stations people are sharing.
With the Ambient Weather WS-5000, the little console panel is also the hub, so you'll have to have it within signal range. You can put their new "Weather Window" elsewhere in the home:
https://ambientweather.com/awn-weather-window
It also supports indoor and outdoor sensors for room, soil, lightning, etc.:
https://ambientweather.com/wh31e-wireless-temperature-humidi...
As a simpler device but remarkably rich start, I'd recommend people try the Tempest to get started:
https://shop.tempest.earth/products/tempest
The API is incredibly easy to work with, both as local devices and as a station:
https://weatherflow.github.io/Tempest/api/
I'm using both brands in a hostile environment, and find the Tempests last better.
I'm also very interested in Weatherflow's network:
https://business.tempest.earth/tempest-network
And as discussed here, Weatherflow Networks collabs with unis and NOAA:
http://weatherflownetworks.com/noaa-national-mesonet-program
On Android and iOS, you can use an app called SmartMixin to commingle and compare readings across multiple brands of weather device.
I've been stuck on what to purchase, especially since there's no dedicated power or network connections (the site does have cellular access).
The biggest hurdle I have is "here's the full kit of shit you need to buy in that case", any suggestions?
I picked this platform because it has a lot of out-of-the-box functionality as I'm just getting started. It looked like I can still play around outside their walled garden as I do more home automation stuff. Beyond the outdoor weather data a site like WU wants, it has sensors for indoor temp and air quality so I can set up some HVAC routines or monitor if my chest freezer for getting too warm. It has a soil moisture sensor and one day I'd like to set up an automatic irrigation system for my garden. I can expand the connected sensors as I think of more things I want to try.
I think I could have accomplished a lot of the same with bare sensors like you're suggesting but I wasn't ready to take that on. That was too much learning curve for me right now.
https://github.com/willglynn/tempest_exporter
Their central web API is nice too (and the tool above can extract metrics from it) but the local, offline data access is what got me in the door. Tempest could shut down their services tomorrow without breaking my setup.
Cyclonic (Hurricanes), baking heat, extended sub zero cold .. ?
I have an interest in stations that can last a long time in bad weather.
It can get a little warmer here: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202402/html/IDCJDW6136.202... and even more so in other parts of the state: http://www.bom.gov.au/climate/dwo/202402/html/IDCJDW6079.202...
( 100F == 37.7C , 109F == 42.7C )
I wish more home technology was so painless.
Edit: Nevermind. It looks like Tempest themselves sends the data to NOAA, so it's already taken care of. Nice.
I’m not sure about ran sensors.
But moving parts are generally bad for reliability.
Citizen Weather Observer Program (CWOP) Information: http://www.wxqa.com/cwop_info.htm
If you're going digital, there are several suggested backbones, eg:
Legacy (oops): https://controlbyweb.com/legacy/x320m/
Current model ($450 US): https://controlbyweb.com/accessories/davis-suite-controller
which is a hub that uploads data from attached sensors, which in turn has details of compatable sensors:
Legacy manual: https://controlbyweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/X-320_um...
Current Integrated bunch of sensors on a stick ( $595 US ): https://controlbyweb.com/accessories/sensor-suite
The CWOP community likely has forums and users experienced in matching suggestions to new member questions.
Depends a lot on your skill | interest levels - the controlbyweb path is one option, and that's $450 pluse extra for sensors ( tempreture, wind speed | direction ), air pressure, etc.
All in ~ $1,100 (US) - controller + base sensors + shipping + some wiring and fitting at your site.
There are likely other products and various levels of kit build, solder your own, etc.
The Complete Tempest Weather System https://shop.tempest.earth/collections/featured/products/tem...
comes in at $339 (US) which is cheaper to get started and promises much - build quality, robustness, etc would have to be compared | asked about.
weewx[1] software supports sending data to CWOP and has drivers for the Davis station among others.
Bonus: you can also send data to CWOP over the ham bands via aprs, and all your data shows up on aprs.fi[2]
[0]: <https://www.wxforum.net/>
[1]: <https://weewx.com/>
[2]: <https://aprs.fi/>
The Vantage Vue hardware is solid; much better than the cheaper kits out there.
Inside its esp8266 based. Currently sells for less than $200.
[1] https://ambientweather.com/support/ws-2902-weather-station-s...
https://ambientweather.com/support/ws-2902-weather-station-s...
https://www.davisinstruments.com/pages/vantage-pro2
His has been working for 20 years now with no problems. There are cheaper ones no doubt, but the ability to add senors like a UV and solar wattage are nice. They also have sensors for soil moisture, and leaf transpiration, but it doesn't rain enough in norcal for those.
At some point, Davis changed the data logger, so I had to buy some USB adapter from some guy in Australia to unlock it, but it works fine. I don't remember the guy's name, or if it's still needed.
I use weewx and a raspberry pi to log everything. Integrated my PurpleAir into weewx and calculate AQIs as well.
There are some platforms for air pollution like OpenAQ [1] or sensor.community [2] but as far as I know none really has such an open API like weather.gov and allows individual contributions.
I built my own using sensors from Sparkfun (also available elsewhere, it’s a pretty standard kit). It uses an ESP32 to read the sensors and submit the data to MQTT, then Node Red on a Pi to push the data to InfluxDB, and finally Grafana for visualization. I love having direct control over everything, and since I built the whole system I can easily expand it with other sensors like the Geiger counter in my garage (luckily that’s a boring sensor to watch) and simple displays:
One thing I didn't see anybody else mention, is your local Air Force unit does an expert job at delivering daily commercial-free weather reports.
Unfortunately it's too remote to have any sort of internet signal beyond cellular at the moment.
I'd appreciate any and all ideas folks have, assuming I'm willing to drop a few grand without blinking.
Additionally, it's in an area with wildfire smoke part of the year and id love to have AQI monitoring.
I'm sure there are people here working at funds that leverage weather data to do exactly that. It would be a really cool job.
Most participants are located in Arizona (project is run by University of Arizona), and kind of makes sense because rain is important in the desert.
One thing I didn't see discussed – your local Air Force unit does a very, very detailed and commercial-free weather reports daily.
I’ll often read 41c outside, 35c in shade, but the weather says it’s currently 29c.
[1] What You May Not Know About GALAXY S4 Innovative Technology:
https://news.samsung.com/global/what-you-may-not-know-about-...
[1] https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/dataset/ecmwf-reanalysis-...