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Comment by droithomme | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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