Xweather Live – Interactive global vector weather map | Hacker News Reader

Xweather Live – Interactive global vector weather map

live.xweather.com

Similar sites:

https://www.ventusky.com

https://www.windy.com/

https://fmhy.pages.dev/misc#climate-weather

Never heard of freemediaheckyeah, I love it. I will have to add ours to the list. One thing that makes us different is we have a LOT more data in one app. If you explore all the layers, you can see tropical cyclone/hurricane data, lightning strikes, hail, renewable energy, and wildfire data. You have to change the focus (top left corner) to see the other collections of layers.

https://earth.nullschool.net

This is admittedly quite niche (as I work on a balloon experiment) but I really appreciate how the nullschool map shows the 10 mbar level (5-7 would be even better if course)

And https://app.precip.ai

https://zoom.earth/ another great one.

It is really cool. I don't think I've seen a weather app like it. Works great on Chrome + desktop. Great job. One small feature idea is showing the most hot and cold places at any one time. I love it!

Yea, and once you zoom out - being able to intuitively see the temperature all around the planet just creates this sense of appreciation for where we are. On top of it, one can't help but notice that we are floating nowhere in particular in this infinite and eternal universe ...

Xweather Live is an ad-free vector weather map built to showcase our weather APIs. It's a fun app with lots of data layers and features.

Feedback welcome!

Thanks. Mainly commenting to bookmark this for an aviation project I’m working on. Let me know if there’s anything that differentiates you - particularly for aviation. Thanks.

Awesome! Our data, like wind, is for ground level applications (we don't have data for higher altitudes). But we do have proprietary lightning data which may be of interest to you. If you go to the top left corner and change the focus from "General Focus" to "Severe" you will see a new collection of layer options related to severe weather. There you can see actual lightning strike data, as well as lightning forecast areas. Most airports use our lightning data!

Thanks!

Out of curiosity, how long did this take to write and what AI stack did you use?

All of the data, including the AI endpoints (Phrase API - https://www.xweather.com/phrases-api), and mapping tools were built using our weather API and MapsGL SDKs. I don't know the exact number of hours but its been worked on for about a year. You could spin up a really basic mapping site like this using the SDKs in a matter of hours.

Very cool site! Would you know of any similar maps that explore climate zones or micro climates?

Thanks. There are quite a few cool projects out there. Someone just shared a link to a collection of free weather maps: https://fmhy.pages.dev/misc#climate-weather

In the future we will also be merging another project into this app which is a collection of data from personal weather stations across the country. That data is really cool because it can fill in coverage gap. https://www.pwsweather.com/map/?ob=temps

> In the future we will also be merging another project into this app which is a collection of data from personal weather stations across the country. That data is really cool because it can fill in coverage gap. https://www.pwsweather.com/map/?ob=temps

I have four stations uploading there - looking forward to see the result!

I love how you can scob the timeline and the weather updates as you move it, in real time. It's the biggest thing I don't like about Windy, it's so slow/laggy when changing the timeline. (Maybe it's better if you live in the US, but here in NZ, it's pain)

I've worked a lot with weather data in the past (and I still am), and I have to appreciate all the work that went into this. Weather model data is notoriously messy with many different formats and standards, and then I'm not even talking about radar data, etc. Probably when you've got this all abstracted away behind an API it is easier to build such a powerful application as this.

This is awesome and very fast especially given all the data displayed!

Beautiful, brings back memories of Dark Sky & forecast.io

Cool idea, but this took about 15 seconds to load for me and then lagged very hard, especially while zooming. So I wasn't able to use it very much before getting frustrated enough to exit the page.

Hmm, it was smooth on my relatively ancient Pixel 3 (running LineageOS 22.2) on Brave browser

Daamn, was smooth as butter on my M2 Macbook

Similar: http://zero.hypatia.earth (no vectors/but WebGPU)

Animating global weather patterns is super cool. It’s wild to see everything move around and ebb and flow. Neat site!

A PWA for mobile would be most welcome

I love PWAs these days. They’re very polished now. A few of my projects I’m going that direction.

Second this.

Sorry if this sounds harsh but this looks similar to commercial weather services in terms of the types of layers. How does this actually work?

Did you manage to track down their other services’ providers and negotiate access?

They can just use the free government services. Most of the 3rd party services just wrap the various government services behind an API.

This is true for many free weather APIs out there. But our weather API is global so we’re not just passing through a single government feed. There’s quite a bit of engineering to normalize all of the data sources. Japanese alerts for example are just XML feeds. All the sources update on different schedules, and have different forecast ranges, so it's a challenge to make sure the best forecast is returned at request time.

Some of our data is proprietary. The lightning strike data is from our own lighting detection network. We also offer the only hail forecast model available which was developed in house :)

It's a fair question. There's a lot of free sources of data out there. This app is powered by our own Weather API: https://www.xweather.com/weather-api

The data is aggregated from global meteorological offices and other sources (some free, some paid). Some of the datasets are proprietary to us. For example, the lightning layers come from our own lightning detection network, and certain forecasts (like hail) are developed in-house.

This app was built to showcase our data. The vector mapping tools are also available via API. https://www.xweather.com/mapsgl

Can someone explain how wind can spiral in to a point? Where does the air "go"? Or does this create a higher pressure?

If it’s showing surface winds, it goes up. On windy.com there’s an altitude slider that lets you choose which wind level you’re looking at. Haven’t found that yet here.

Oh thanks that altitude slider is very interesting. Makes me want to see a 3d visualization.

It looks really cool, but all the numbers jiggle around when I pan the map on my phone (Android, Chrome)

Neat. Overlay city labels are doubled-up over map tile city labels?

really cool, but the search field doesn't update the map after I type in a new location. (safari Version 26.3 (21623.2.7.11.6))

Thanks for catching that, and including browser details.

Very cool concept and worked really well

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