Visualizing Weather Forecasts Through Landscape Imagery | Hacker News Reader

Visualizing Weather Forecasts Through Landscape Imagery

github.com

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I noodled with a project a couple of years ago to pick art based on the weather https://bazzargh.github.io/weather/

put it on 'manual filter' and try setting some of the filters, you can see the tagged images it comes up with. I wasn't really interested in this being an accurate weather report, I was thinking more of using it in a photoframe or as a desktop background for mood.

the image tags are all in here https://github.com/bazzargh/bazzargh.github.io/blob/master/w...

and were largely done manually, I started by picking paintings I liked, then looking for gaps in the tags and trying to find paintings to cover those.

Your page is getting flagged for phishing on Chrome.

In FF as well, Just reported it as "not suspicious"

Huh. That's new. I'm guessing it must have been someone who read it here, I don't think I ever even posted it anywhere else. I'm not sure what they could think it's phishing for; there's no links out, no redirection, and nowhere for you to enter any personal information; the only thing it does is pull images from wikimedia, plus the source code is right there for all to see?

If it was anyone here who reported it... mind telling us why?

Ha, this is great. I hooked up an old photo frame to OpenAI's DALL-E image generator, which is told to make an image based on the current weather data right now. It updates every few hours.

This is what it's showing right now: https://ibb.co/8K5jZ3B

See also: https://github.com/blixt/sol-mate-eink (using city images)

This is really lovely!

Really cool! Thanks for sharing. Is there a reason rpi 5 is needed versus older versions of rpi (which I have plenty)?

Not my project and I only know it because a friend starred it. Guessing I would say you could run it with sth much less powerful as it just calls the openai based online service linked. Just thought the look is kind of nice.

Thanks everyone for the valuable feedback. In addition to the description in the readme, I'd like to share my specific use case for the project, which may not be immediately obvious.

I have the screen set up on my desk, and the image evolves throughout the day. Watching these changes is surprisingly enjoyable. For example, rain might appear from the right side and disappear after a few hours, or trees might start to grow. Meanwhile, the sun and moon steadily move forward, marking the transition between day and night.

Another fun aspect is how the setup resembles a binary clock. People often suspect it represents something meaningful but don’t always know how to interpret it. Still, the simplicity of the design invites them to try and figure it out.

This is super-fun. Kinda makes me want to do the following: set up a camera to take regular photos of a greenspace near my house. Record couldcover data and date stamps alongside the images, and then then show the most similar image to the current forecast as a background, maybe on my laptop. Wouldn't convey as much information as this project, but it could be very satisfying.

Cute, and with small adjustments, I'd be legitimately using this. There are just better ways to interpret things:

1. Make the bending trees signify wind direction. Have to get creative with north and south, but a tree bent down vs out can do, and the bend or size and clustering of trees should signify magnitude of the wind.

2. Put sunrise and sunset as literally sun over the horizon, not the sun and moon.

3. Make the night sky shaded differently than day

4. Don't start at "current time" but rather a fixed point, either morning or midnight, and specify the "now" via the location of the house

All good points, agreed. Except #4, would be cute if there's some animal that moves along instead of the house.

And perhaps playing with some kind of isometric perspective could help visualize wind directions?

> Would be cute if there's some animal that moves along instead of the house.

I can suggest a snail with a shell that has a window and a chimney out the back!

It can also be a something man-made but playful like a freight train with a caboose. You’d only see the back end of the train and it would move off screen over the course of the day.

Mind you, trains are now ruined for me with John Oliver’s production of Thomas the tank engine.

Maybe shadows (length and direction) could give a sense of time of day, along with shading of sky and land.

The idea offers plenty of room for creativity, but I was limited by the small black-and-white screen. There's no way to show trees bending in the wind or snails crawling across it. However, there's still space in the sky to add fun elements, like a stork for someone's birthday or Santa's sleigh during the holidays. I'm waiting for larger, full-color E-Ink screens to become affordable.

Another comment posted a project using waveshares 7 inch color epaper ($85).

I've been using a similar concept for my Android wallpaper for a while now[1].

I love the idea of artwork that actually conveys useful information.

[1]: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kaka.wallpaper...

I've had this live wallpaper for years and always liked it.

Reminds me of the main view in the Yr.no app, which visualises the weather as a picture of how things would look outside a window at different times of the day. It is actually quite easy to get a feel for the amount (and type) of precipitation, as well as the wind, from the animations.

However, you only get to see one moment at a time, requiring you to scroll horizontally through the day, and the temperature is only shown as a number.

https://apps.apple.com/no/app/yr/id490989206?l=nb

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=no.nrk.yr&pcam...

Great work! That said if we are focusing on the UX, windy.com has got the best weather reporting experience.

Ex: I am almost never interested in "30% chance of shower at 08:00pm" type of forecast. I am more interested in the trend in which the clouds/rains are moving. This helps me figure out which direction I can drive to get the best sunshine or whatever else.

Is there anyone else who is doing it the way windy.com is doing? I really love them, and so far their experience is great (almost no dark UX patterns), that said I would love to see some more competition in this space.

I’m a big fan of Meteoblue, they provide a lot of different forecast ensemble visualizations. While not the same as windy in terms of ux, it does a good job of conveying model uncertainty and model agreement.

Zoom Earth is similar to Windy.com

https://zoom.earth/

Weather Strip (iOS) https://apps.apple.com/us/app/weather-strip/id1528594026

> This helps me figure out which direction I can drive to get the best sunshine or whatever else.

I published a road trip weather app that crunches forecasts for you if you're going for a drive and would like to avoid the worst of the weather. It's great for evaluating whether to start a trip during the evening or the next morning. Timestamps are built using Google directions so you have about as accurate a forecast as you can in 2024.

> I am almost never interested in "30% chance of shower at 08:00pm" type of forecast.

I understand this sentiment but that is sorta where medium term forecasting is right now.

Android or iOS https://weatherthetrip.com/download

We used windy.com earlier this year to choose our location for the total eclipse in Texas. Worked out perfectly - great view for the eclipse, then the clouds rolled in...

It's an interesting idea, but some of the image semantics seem weirdly wrong. In particular, the sky shouldn't be light at night, and the sun shouldn't be high at sunrise.

If you have to learn counterintuitive things like "the appearance of the sun anywhere in the sky indicates sunrise", and "nighttime is indicated by, well, idk what exactly, but it's not darkness", it kind of fails at it's main purpose, I think.

EDIT: I'll add that many weather apps have a left-to-right timeline of some sort, and indicate sunrise and sunset with intuitive iconography.

EDIT2: The Windy.com timeline view shows sky condition, day/night, moon phase, temperature, precipitation, and wind speed and direction in a nice compact left-to-right timeline. (click the summary in the upper left)

I fully expected an llm hooked up to an image gen ai that turns weather forecast into hyper realistic images, and was pleasantly surprised to see a good old deterministic mapping of data onto carefully chosen visuals in a system where an actual human made actual design choices. how strange!

Very cool, I also developed this idea with Zima weather dashboard (https://zima.farawaytech.com) There is also sunset/sunrise, and different weather types

This is one of the best microcontroller projects I've encoutered recently! Amazing work!

Love it! It's like the Chernoff face[1] of weather forecasts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chernoff_face

Neat!

I am throwing in my Plotly.js-based weather display, based on OpenWeatherMap and hand-drawn graphics: https://github.com/quimoniz/ophelia?tab=readme-ov-file#-ophe...

(by default it also displays the Hacker News newsfeed)

Love love love love this. This would be great for kids. I pitched a very similar "weather for kids" visualizer product idea on the very first episode of my podcast.

https://spitball.show/@podcast/episodes/1

Chamonix does something like this for their weather forecasts. It works really well! Lots of info available at a glance, especially once you get accustomed to the format.

https://en.chamonix.com/weather

These are gorgeous. What a great idea.

How much effort to create a weather app for ios or andriod that works like this? Maybe so something for the nest home max or echo show? I love the idea, but what is the easiest way to get this onto the most number of devices?

Love the monochrome artwork, great work on this project.

Looks great, would love if it was fully offline and interface with sensors directly

Maybe I misread the docs, but it looked like it was generating a visual for the whole day. If this were offline you could have it double as a clock and regenerate the image every N minutes.

Very nice and inspiring idea I will try to implement it and my project

This is really cool! I would use this daily if it were an app

Reminds me a little bit of Tad Williams’ Otherland series.

It's like a line-scan camera for the weather.

Really nice"

From readme:

> Traditional weather stations often display sensor readings as raw numerical data. Navigating these dashboards can be overwhelming and stressful, as it requires significant effort to locate, interpret, and visualize specific parameters effectively.

Simply fascinating. The reverse holds true for me. Numbers provide easily identifiable and recognizable references, while sample images look incomprehensible to me. Without accompanying descriptions, I'd never guess what the author is getting at (except in the broadest of strokes). To each their own, of course.

Don't take it too seriously :)

If you'd like to see this implemented in a practical way, check out Weather Strip.

It's a master class in information density while also being intuitive and readable.

https://www.weatherstrip.app/

Note that this kind of visualization is just the collapsed form of a standard forecast graph, e.g.

https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.39&lon=-122...

https://www.wunderground.com/forecast/us/ca/mountain-view

Dang Mountain View has some enviable conditions...

To enjoy those conditions, however, you have to endure Mountain View.

(Seriously, it's not a great place. The surroundings are great, but the place itself is strip mall central)

In a somewhat related vein, the wonderful Ootside[0] website gives you the weather with a Scottish twist.

Mostly, the weather around where I live is described as 'Mostly shite'.

[0] https://ootsi.de/

Mine is "Glaekit", whatever that means.

It means 'stupid' in Scots so... probably just a joke by the author? Or maybe they were reaching for some similar words and missed - like 'drookit' (soaking wet), 'gloweret' (ominous sky), 'gloamin' (twilight), 'glaupit' (slimy, muddy), 'glamsy' (sky a mix of bright and dark)

There's a dictionary here https://dsl.ac.uk/ but glaekit is a common enough word in normal conversation in scotland, most people here would know what it means.

It looks lovely but it's absolutely incomprehensible beyond "maybe it'll rain" and "maybe i'll be sunny". Without the explanation of what the symbols meant I'd never guess.

Yes, this is part of the fun. Kind of having a binary clock on the table.

Can't wait for the stable diffusion version :)

Now there are two of us.

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