Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies | Hacker News Reader

Wunderground.com sold to The Weather Channel Companies

wunderground.com

117 pointskapkapkap101 comments

That is really unfortunate. Weather Underground actually has the weather, the Weather Channel on the other hand is just crap.

Obviously this is another "acquisition" that is intended solely and transparently at eliminating an agile competitor who makes a better product.

Yes, I'm worried as well.

Wundermap (http://www.wunderground.com/wundermap/) is literally the only functional weather map on the internet.

I used it to find a spot to drive to to see Venus transit because everything in the vicinity was covered with clouds. I don't how I would be able to accomplish this without wundermap. I would be extremely sad to see it go.

I don't know... I think I'm "and nothing of value was lost" on this one. Weather underground is spammy and terrible just like all the others.

Anyone know if there is a http://time.is for weather? Or someplace where I can easily see weather conditions on a driving route? Really just anyplace that has thought for more than half a second about the kind of weather info people want and how to present it? I mean this is simple shit.

weatherspark.com ROCKS (no affiliation)

You can customize how you want the data and then bookmark a link to that exact configuration. The two pieces of data that I want are the radar and temperature vs time graph (which not every app has). Here's my link as an example:

http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/IL/Crystal_Lake;dt...

In the US we use weather.gov. They provide data streams as well for anyone looking to develop something custom.

I wonder how long it will be before they kill off http://classic.wunderground.com. What's the next best source for weather?

For something dead simple, there's http://goingtorain.com/

Similar for the UK, is http://www.raintoday.co.uk/

http://www.intellicast.com/ is my go to weather app.

http://thefuckingweather.com/

It's not fucking working.

I don't think Weather Channel was threatened by Wunderground's market share. A more plausible explanation I've heard is to reduce competition for advertisers in the weather space.

weatherspark.com That will surly suit your fancy

I concur, weatherspark is awesome. My only complaint is that the documentation is a little lacking for some of the advanced charts.

Does anyone know if NWS has a good API?

There are number of different ways to access the NWS data and graphs - not surprisingly it is hard to discover them! They do have an XML web service for daily and hourly forecasts http://graphical.weather.gov/xml/ but you can also download binary files that contain all the same weather elements for the US.

I'm actually close to completing a python library that will be open source and provide an easy way to access the NWS national digital forecast database.

It's pretty good. Last time I looked (3-4 years ago), the hard part was getting decent radar data/images.

Your sentences would appear to contradict each other.

Not really. Now advertisers can't play one platform off against the other. Now they'll just sell you ads across both platforms with better rates.

The "market" is the advertisers, so definitely a threat. One reason Facebook seems different is that it's more naturally social, but the truism remains: if you're not paying, you're not the customer. That WU pinned an ad-free account at $10/YEAR tells me TWC was likely not happy with them as competitors.

But competition is good.

This statement is total bullshit. Weather Underground doesn't have better data or coverage than the Weather Channel. If you're really looking for more coverage, check out the weather blogs.

They do have a huge network of personal weather stations that the Weather Channel doesn't have. It's mentioned in the blog post that the Weather Channel was going to start incorporating that data on weather.com.

I used Wunderground for years, but in the past few months, their local data went crazy. They were emitting ridiculous data like eight degrees hotter than any other station. I reported the bad data, and I got back a form email about how great their "new" algorithms were. They definitely need some outlier filters to kill off idiots putting their thermometers in the sun over asphalt, or whatever was the problem. I looked around and, oddly enough, ended up using weather.com. I now have a morbid fascination with their record of the high for the day at some exact time...

The real skill in weather seems to be from WeatherBill, now The Climate Corporation:

http://ecorner.stanford.edu/author/david_friedberg

When there is big money on the accuracy of the weather prediction and measurement, they tend to get it right.

I haven't seen that around me. My only issue is that a PWS that was near my house went offline, so the "nearest" to me is a buoy in Lake Michigan which in the evening is about 10-15 degrees cooler than everywhere else.

How many fans will stop publishing their data to spite them for the acquisition or if the site gets more evil? I wonder.

A fairly large number of them in my area (I'd say like 80%+) are associated with things like schools or hospitals, so I bet a lot of them are going to stick around.

It's still sad though. Weather.com doesn't have anything that works as well as the WunderMap, and certainly nothing I can leave running 24/7 in a browser unless I want to restart it every few hours.

This is interesting. I think it's a good fit from a business model perspective (both are ad-driven, albeit TWC more so), but the fan bases are very different. The geeks at Wunderground are already crying foul ("YOU ARE GOING TO DESTROY WXUG!") and the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden. Also, Wundergrounders trust the lack of hype/sensationalism from Wunderground, but the same is never said about TWC.

Does anyone want to venture a guess as to why TWC would bother to acquire Wunderground?

>the typical fan of The Weather Channel is probably wondering why everyone is talking about weather happening underground all of a sudden.

Or radical leftists:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather_Underground

It's worth noting that's not coincidental: both came out of the University of Michigan.

You're echoing my thoughts exactly. The first thing that came to mind with this headline was 'Well, about the only weather site I care about.'

What I've heard is that under (relatively new) ownership - meaning Comcast/NBC, there is a new push to expand revenue, and since weather.com already 'owns' the mass market, the only way to do that is to acquire, and will be to acquire more, revenue generating properties.

If I was TWC, I'd use the network of private weather stations all feeding into WXUG to create hyper-local forecasts or even a mobile app that can push-alert you on the ETA of upcoming storms.

I remember turning on the weather channel in high school, and the person would always stand in front of the west coast, blather on about the east coast at length, and then dedicate a few seconds to the west: "it's going to be sunny in most of California (no kidding), with massive snowstorms in eastern Washington which may or may not isolate the entire state, now back to you Bob".

Up until 1992 the weathermen would still stand in front of the hurricane while blathering on about rainstorms in the midwest. Then Andrew happened and that changed everything.

Wow. I am crestfallen. Loved the service for years and have been a paying member for a while.

Weather underground did a great job of making historical and trending weather information available. They do a great job of supporting local weather blogs, too.

I wonder how long until the "integration" occurs and it is just a memory.

That's too bad. I always liked the raw radar imagery. (OK, not really raw, but the same images that real forecasters get.) The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

I guess I will have to write a quick perl script to generate my own images now.

>The Weather Channel is too mainstream; all their imagery is editorialized and dumbed down for an audience that just wants to know if it's going to rain today.

Not to mention that their forecasts are presented in a way that is statistically incoherent. Look at their hourly forecasts, then click to break down by 15 minute intervals. It is common to see things like "rain during 2:00-3:00 = 30%", and then also have something like 50% during one of the 15 minute intervals within that time range. I have yet to come up with a hypothesis for what those percentages could mean, and have that scenario be possible.

30% chance of rain actually means 30% of the area is projected to have rain covering it rather than there being a 30% chance you will be rained on.

An unlikely, but theoretically possible way to get 50% inside of 15 minute interval but 20% over an hour would be if the model prodicted very widespread rain in a band moving over an area and time weighted the percentage.

> 30% chance of rain actually means 30% of the area is projected to have rain covering it

Common misconception. The Chance of precipitation is actually stating that historically, given these conditions x% of days produced precipitation. It is a statement of the odds that it will rain at all.

http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/854/what-does-it-me...

That site you provide (or cite) is the only one I can find that describes it that way. Every other source describes the otherway which I still think is correct:

NOAA: http://www.srh.noaa.gov/ffc/?n=pop

http://www.usatoday.com/weather/resources/askjack/wadefine.h...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Probability_of_precipitation

Even those links state the PoP is a measure of the chance that it will happen at all. That is the historical measurement.

No, that is the simplified explanation of how the average person should think about it. We are talking about the definition and a possible way to get the odd results the OP mentioned observing.

Purely speculating, but it may be the expected duration of rain. So 30% in one hour means on the average it will rain 18 minutes within that hour and 50% of 15 mins would be 7.5 rainy minutes.

My real guess is that they have independent models for different time resolutions.

My understanding is that this would mean that ~30% of the computer models predict rain between 2:00-3:00. I doubt they would stake everything on a singular model, but I could be wrong.

If you're an OS X or iOS user, check out RadarScope: http://www.basevelocity.com/RadarScope/ - it's a prosumer weather radar app, and it's got what you're looking for. I'm not affiliated with them in any way, just a happy user.

> I guess I will have to write a quick perl script to generate my own images now.

a few years from now: sells to Facebook for $1B ;)

You might be interested in http://lug.rose-hulman.edu/proj/aweather

I understand the lament over wunderground.com being sold, but have any of you checked out what the National Weather Service offers? It's been my go-to site for years, is pretty spot on, has no-nonsense text based emergency notifications, makes it easy to hop over to hydrographic data, and a bunch of other things.

Today I just happened across this prediction format which is about all I could hope for as well:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=42.62840&lo...

Wow. That's great. I may use that from now on.

Graphs are much more convenient for answering "when today will it probably rain"? And all the other graphs provide really nice context.

That's pretty awesome. My-Cast for iOS presents something similar when you're in landscape mode.

I imagine they bought wunderground for the Personal Weather Stations. They have thousands of people sending them data in real time from their personal weather stations.

I bet if someone were to quickly make an equivalent API that collected all this data from these users and presented it in a similar fashion, they'd draw a lot of those PWS contributors away from NBC/Weather Channel.

Didn't this happen with Escient CDDB and FreeDB? You can't assume the community will keep providing you data when there's a plug-in replacement.

For those looking for an alternative: http://weatherspark.com/#

Indeed. To the scientifically-minded, I find their graph-based model many times easier to read and more thorough than any other source, wunderground included.

Definitely a win for those guys if they carpe diem.

Well, after trying out stormpulse, wunderground seems kind of, well, less interesting.

Well, thanks! :)

According to the announcement, the acquisition will "make both wunderground.com and weather.com stronger," so Wunderground fans have nothing to worry about. Right? :-(

The Weather Channel has been going through a lot of restructuring and making big improvements over the past 3 years. Knowing Jeff Masters and his passion for the Weather Underground format, I do believe this has more to do with The WxChannel leveraging Wunderground.com's treasure trove of data, including personal weather stations. Also, Jeff's Tropical Update blogs and others truly are are high-quality content that will help the general public's (weather.com's audience) understanding of severe storms. Weather Underground was kind enough to point its users to our recently-retired http://www.onestorm.org/ for hurricane planning.

Can anybody explain what Wunderground and TWC offer above the NWS? They're both just calling the NWS API and wrapping it in ads, right? Do either of them do any kind of additional analysis or processing to make the forecasts more accurate? The few times I've checked they're always been mirroring the weather.gov data. The government is known for being clunky, but I've always thought they did a pretty good job here [1], though I did like their old layout a little better.

[1] http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?textField1=40.01498...

Weather Underground did gather data from a variety of sources (http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.asp) and displayed more fine grain results that the "regular" person who cares about weather would never look at.

I have Weather Underground, The Weather Network and the default Apple Weather app (which pulls from Yahoo I believe) and I always found Weather Underground to be more accurate on both a large scale and in their hourly reports.

On the topic of weather sites: I really prefer http://yr.no website lately. (Don't be fooled by .no, it's based in Norway, but they cover the whole world)

My inner geek likes the most the hour-by-hour weather graphs: http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/hour_by_... - and the statistics page - http://www.yr.no/place/Czech_Republic/Prague/Prague/statisti...

When I found Yr.no a few months ago I liked it, but it only is a forecast -- at least for a US location -- and I need current conditions as well!

Oh, that's true, I haven't actully noticed it.

Check this site out: http://www.my-cast.com/#California

Pannable, Zoomable animated radar and satellite cloud map.

I think it's the best site for monitoring severe weather.

It seems US-based and the temperatures are in Fahrenheit, while I am from Europe and prefer Celsius :)

As a PWS (Personal Weather Station) contributor (KORTALEN1) to wunderground for many years, this concerns me. I live in Rural Oregon and the local PWS's provide a much needed micro look at local weather. Plus, I rely on wunderground's great radar presentation and access to the local Scientific Forecaster discussion. I worry that this kind of detailed scientific data and analysis will start to be lost in the inevitable dumbing down that will come.

I run my own niche weather site http://www.climbingweather.com that focuses on weather for climbing areas in the United States. It's not full-featured like Weather Underground, but I've often wondered if it would be worth my time to generalize it for a larger audience. This story somewhat inspires me to give it a shot.

If you ever want to talk about bootstrapping a weather startup, shoot me a line.

I can vouch for Matt being the real deal. He's successfully been working on Stormpulse in South Florida for the past several years and he's a super helpful guy to know (in the world of weather or not).

Both of you gents are doing some neat things with the weather. We also do some ski centric forecasting @ http://www.famousinternetskiers.com/weather/

I'm a mountaineer and never knew of these sites. Absolutely thrilled to see them on HN. Also, I'd pay for a user friendly data centric weather app focused on ski, climb, and outdoor activity weather reporting. I've been using nws.noaa.gov and weather.unisys.com for years and the UI is lacking. Just installed the free climbingweather.com app!!

Nice! Thanks for downloading the app! My next front burner project involves another niche weather site but focused on outdoors more generally. The outdoor climbing community is relatively small, so although I get decent traffic to the site, I'd like to do something a bit larger.

I'm also working on a Python library that interfaces with the national weather service for daily and hourly forecasts. It's about 95% done, although that last 5% can be tough.

Definitely. I think I may have met you at PyCon last year(?).

Yep!

I definitely hope that the site continues on as it is, I love the sheer amount of data that's available.

Weather.gov also does a nice job.

They even have modern stuff like short urls:

http://weather.gov/20500

The only thing they're missing is something like Weather Undergrounds easy radar map.

That provided XML for the forecast might come in handy for something I was going to do though.

I hope they carry over the WunderMap. Of all the radars I've browsed, theirs is definitely the quickest, and has all sorts of layers to customize it with. (As well as a multitude of station readings.)

It looks like they'll be keeping the Wunderground site as-is, but I've learned from past experiences that those kinds of statements don't hold up too well down the road ..

Greatest feature of wunder is access to local station streams like this

http://weather.barryt.org/wdl/index.html http://weather.barryt.org/

Just some guy that loves weather.

It's interesting to compare the almost-unanimous condemnation of this sale with that of other HN articles about acquisitions. Not even one 'attaboy, Jeff' comment for the founder cashing out?

I wonder what the response would have been if the buyer was Google, not TWC.

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

It's too bad I can't use their service with HTTPS everywhere, but awesome that it's a user experience they considered.

I hope they keep the ad-free subscription model. I've been a paying member for years. Browsing weather ad-free is such a relief.

There's an opportunity out there for someone to make a weather site with a stripped down interface.

I've a feeling Joel Spolsky's comment on the 80/20 rule applies to weather sites: "80% of the people use 20% of the features. [...] Unfortunately, it's never the same 20%."

With weather it should be pretty simple. Temp and odds of precipitation are the two biggies. Have nice radar/sat images/loops easily accessible. Put the other stuff farther down.

Yep. Where it gets complicated is when the situation changes and storms erupt. Then what?

That's where the good radar/sat stuff comes in. Wunderground does a good job at this, their stuff is very customizable. Lately I have been digging the Dark Sky app, weather at its most simple. It tackles very short term forecasts with specificity (it's going to rain in 8 minutes). I live in Florida so I know it's going to be hot, the only question for me is rain.

That's exactly what we've attempted to do / have done with Stormpulse.

$280 a year is an absolute joke for a weather site for an individual user.

If I may ask, what qualifies you to make that judgement? I think it really depends on your need for said information.

Okay.

isn't that google? q=weather 94107

I really hope they keep the wunderground telnet server running. I find that thing invaluable.

Oh shit. Good for Wunderground, bad for me. I can't stand weather.com

weather channel bought weatherbonk.com a few years ago, then shut it down. hope this doesn't happen to wunderground.

Wunderground just repackages National Weather Service data. If you can forgive the 90s design, weather.gov is perfect.

Just replaced today* with a new design: http://weather.gov/redesign

* After being in preview for a while.

I'm a huge fan of weather.gov, mostly because I know it's my taxpayer dollars.

I can't believe they sold out, I thought they were underground!

Nooh, now only big weather will tell us our meteorological future. First ObamaCare and now this. This country has lost its way.

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