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Comment by dlcarrier | Hacker News Reader

Commercial weather APIs usually consolidate information most governments provide for free, for the benefit of nautical/aeronautical trade. If you just need local data, search for you government's API.

Here's the National Weather Service API, for those in the US: https://api.weather.gov

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FWIW, there are people who would very much like to see that no longer be the case in the US.

AccuWeather has lobbied hard to privatize weather data. However, I'm not sure who would be collecting that data if the government stopped collecting it for them.

I would imagine (off of no solid evidence) that they'd love to see the entire system privatized including the infrastructure. Could be wrong, though.

Oh, they want the government to keep collecting it, they just want to make sure it's not provided to us citizens for free.

Good to know. I will stop using their website if they are like this. Weather data should be free because its for everyone

Yep. https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/radar/next-generation-wea...

Not an API, but I really like supercell wx for a local radar terminal. Cross platform and works great on Linux. It does require an API key to do the map rendering, but the actual weather data is pulled from government sources (free)

https://github.com/dpaulat/supercell-wx

Can I get radar data from this. I saw that I can get a list of radar stations and meta data from them but I would like the radar data (really imaged would probably be better). Thank you for the post.

I'd be surprised if you couldn't, but if that's the case, look for APIs directly from Mesonet or NowCOAST.

https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/ -- I think this is every NWS radar station with a 30 minute animated gif loop, along with the individual frames that make up that loop.

I know it used to be possible to get these same images -- but with the actual radar imagery separated from the base map, didn't have time to find those, but I'd guess they're still around somewhere.

Edit: a bunch of different radar-imagery only layers from each station over a longer time period: https://mrms.ncep.noaa.gov/RIDGEII/L3/

MRMS is generally much better than RIDGE

There's an Android app which seems to surface this exact same data: https://github.com/dh4/WeatherRadar

Yep, everyone I know in Australia just uses the BOM (the government bureau of meteorology) app. (If they aren't just using whatever build in weather app they have, that is.)

I've never understood what benefit any other app could provide given they are just ingesting the BOM data.

and for a streamlined way to grab weather forecast data directly from multiple governments national weather service APIs, there’s the library UniWeather.js:

https://github.com/ghobs91/UniWeather.js

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