Beta.weather.gov | Hacker News Reader

Beta.weather.gov

beta.weather.gov

77 pointsronbenton26 comments

What did this site do? I use forecast.weather.gov as my weather site; it still works.

It was an in progress rewrite of the weather.gov frontend, to make it more user friendly and accessible.

Does anyone know if it was actually good or a trainwreck like the Reddit redesign.

New doesn't always mean better.

I’d used it some and liked it, though I hadn’t used it extensively. At the very least, some of the parts that had already come out of it to the main site (like the interactive radar) were very useful and good upgrades.

Historically, NOAA's redesigns are pretty good.

They focus on presenting a good amount of data in a pretty simple way.

Because of the nature of what they do there will always be a ton of data to present or display. At least in my opinion, NOAA does a great job here.

Their UIs have always been simple, easy to use, and reliable. Some data gets buried but that's the nature of it.

The water.noaa.gov redesign (the last 2-3 years) is considerably less usable on mobile. The old site was old, sure, but they were too interested in making it look and feel new, that they didn't prioritize the basic functionality.

I'm sure the team is well-intentioned, but it should have been done more thoughtfully.

Many years ago, I wrote a little script for scraping someone's weather site and returning the bare essentials for current conditions. The script began breaking down as they didn't support that raw HTML interface very well. Then at some point, I acquired a feature phone and I was interested in figuring out the currents/forecast as I was out and about. The KaiOS built-in web browser was functional but crippled, so again I had major issues accessing weather sites to find out what I needed.

I knew a colleague who is on a sailing team and I knew she would know weather, so I asked her, what is a good weather site without much ads and with a simple interface? And she replied immediately, weather.gov. I could have kissed her, because this was such an amazing and pragmatic idea I wouldn't have come up with on my own. And weather.gov has been my go-to weather site for probably 15 years.

It will suck if weather.gov's service is degraded in some way. No matter how many people hate it for existing, the USGov truly puts out excellent science and fantastic content. So much of it is publicly exposed, public domain, and in the service of the American people. It will be sad to watch this valuable infrastructure decay or be abandoned.

There was a comment here that I no longer see from someone that may work at Meteoblue (or majority shareholder Windy) which was very informative about various weather models. I think it’d be great if that person would write a post and share it, because I’d like to find a service that can provide the most reliable forecast dumps for our use in behavioral predictions.

The Meteoblue predictions seem sometimes much different from other predictions, and it was said that Meteoblue had a combined model that may be better than all other models, so I’d like to see some data.

For posterity, here's the full text of the page:

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beta.weather.gov Has Been Deactivated Until Further Notice

This page has been deactivated until further notice due to the loss of critical federal staff, which leaves this project without the resources required to continue its development or for routine monitoring and maintenance.

The National Weather Service remains committed to designing a more informative and user-friendly Weather.gov website, and we intend to reactivate this beta site as soon as resources are in place.

In the meantime, please continue to utilize Weather.gov as a source for official National Weather Service forecasts and warnings.

Thank you to everyone who has and continues to provide feedback to improve National Weather Service systems like beta.weather.gov!

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It's been that way since at least March 20, 2025:

https://archive.ph/beta.weather.gov

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