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116 pointsaaronbrethorst44 comments

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In the US, National Weather Service is free and ad free and has a staff of top notch meteorologists.

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.267153&lon=-...

I am a huge fan the hourly weather graph:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.26715&lon=-9...

Also available in tabular format for your parsing pleasure:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.26715&lon=-9...

In Australia we have BOM (bureau of meteorology) which most of the localised weather apps pull in from due to Accuracy.

For example in my City there is this table [1] which has all the suburbs listed with their current status + recorded time

The iOS apps published by third parties seem to do quite well, so they cover the cost of the data [2] which is probably provided in CSV format..

[1] http://www.bom.gov.au/wa/observations/perth.shtml [2] http://www.bom.gov.au/other/charges.shtml

The National Weather Service is something we did really well. We give away free national weather data, ocean monitoring data, air monitoring data, doppler radar, plus predictions for everything from floods to hurricanes. Their weather stations are everything from thousands of fixed stations to over a hundred weather balloons they fly daily to supplementary data from ships that have weather stations on board.

It really is an impressive variety of data.

Don't forget to mention Dial-A-Buoy.[1] There is also a neat whale+buoy project at NOAA but I forget the name.

NOAA and NIST are something we do very well.

[1] http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/dial.shtml

And, don't forget all the shortwave radio stations that have constantly been broadcasting forecasts and alerts for decades.

http://www.nws.noaa.gov/nwr/nwrrcvr.htm

And let's not forget NIST...

http://www.nist.gov/pml/div688/grp40/wwv.cfm

Just throwing my local in the mix:

Japan Meteorological Agency http://www.jma.go.jp/en/jikei/319.html

Interestingly, national meteorological services seem to be among the few public institution that do "free data for the public good" right in general. Well done! I'm throwing in the Norwegian Meteorological Institute's Yr.no [1] ("yr" meaning drizzle or lively/excited/giddy).

Global data is available [2], as is data from measuring stations in Norway [3]. Apparently the service is so popular that printouts of today's weather (in Norwegian) have been found hanging in hotels in other European countries.

[1] http://www.yr.no/

[2] http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

[3] http://om.yr.no/verdata/klimadata/ (Norwegian only)

Dont forget the national time laboratories. Out of curiosity do you know if Justervesenet, Norwegian Metrology and Accreditation Service falls under the same organization structure as the NWI?

I really envy you guys. I'm somewhat of a weather enthusiast and here in Germany the (tax funded) Wetterdienst [0] makes only out-of-date low resolution weather data freely available.

There are better systems like webKonrad [1] (live radar data down to city level, etc) available but as a common citizen you can't even get paid access. Access is reserved to the fire department, etc.

Funnily though there was a little f*ck up in the webKonrad app and they had hard coded credentials to a developer test account in the app. With a little reverse engineering we had free access to this pretty cool tool for a few months.

IMHO it's pretty sad that they fund the whole German Wetterdienst operation with taxes and citizens have no access to the full data.

[0] - http://www.dwd.de

[1] - http://webkonrad.dwd.de

Have you considered suing for access?

I thought about it but decided that it would be too much effort and too costly for just a hobby of mine.

So I contacted the german Pirate Party about the issue. (About that and german air space maps which, too, are not freely accessible while being produced with tax money).

I assumed this issue would be a great fit for the PP's agenda. But I guess they have more important things to do (like wasting time with arguing about childish bullshit).

Anecdotally, Yr.no's data [1] is good for most of northern Europe. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute's simulation domain [2] seems to cover most of Germany.

[1] http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

[2] http://www.yr.no/kart/#lat=67.73265&lon=5.44686&zoom=3&laga=...

>"I really envy you guys."

A trip to the doctor will cure you of that.

The weather service here in Hong Kong offers an amazing array of data from ambient gamma radiation levels in various locations by the hour:

http://www.weather.gov.hk/radiation/rmn_hourly_e.htm

to real-time lightning stike mapping:

http://www.weather.gov.hk/wxinfo/llis/gm_index.htm

Despite the horrendous design, the functionality is quite impressive. They even host a separate site for senior citizens complete with super-sized fonts, simpler data presentation, and a magnifying glass.

http://elderly.weather.gov.hk/socare.htm

I suspect the landing page text was not written by a native English-speaker. I'd suggest an edit and giving it a professional once-over.

The popular weather aggregating websites generally do a poor job outside of the US. Presumably because they rely on a global weather data source rather than the country-specific agencies.

When travelling, I typically reference the World Meteorological Organization's site to find the official forecasts:

http://worldweather.wmo.int/

They list official observations, forecasts, and climate data for ~1700 cities worldwide in numerous languages and provide the link to the respective official local national weather service for each country.

And if you live in a typhoon/hurricane susceptible region as I do, their severe weather website aggregates official tracking estimates and forecasts from a multitude of weather services:

http://severe.worldweather.org/

Like another commenter I am curious about where the data comes from. The occasional blinking dot on a map does not provide a lot of information about how they amassed the data from 40,000 weather stations. When I did not see a lot of details it occurred to me that they might be acting as a middleman for Weather underground's API. However Weather Underground claims to have the most weather stations and they list a lower bound of 25,000 weather stations.[1]

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/about.asp

They use public airport weather data

Who is "they"? I am assuming you mean openweather. Given that the page linked above details the use of personal weather stations you certainly cannot be referring to WeatherUnderground. Where did you find the source of the data for openweather?

Addendum: See my comment below. The number of airports and airfields visible from the air does not get you over 45k.

Yup, when i zoomed in to see the station information, all of them are airports.

The numbers do not add up. According to the CIA in 2012 there were 43,794 airports or airfields that are recognizable from the air. This number includes airfields that are "unpaved (grass, earth, sand, or gravel surfaces) and may include closed or abandoned installations." The 2010 figure is 43,982.[2][3]

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...

[2] http://web.archive.org/web/20120208135324/https://www.cia.go...

[3] I found this to be interesting: Afghanistan lost an airport/airfield over those two years.

Looks like they are using airport data (identified by ICAO ID) and ham radio data (probably via APRS, identified by callsigns), like this one: KA0RUX http://openweathermap.org/station/10400 http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=KA0RUX

There is also an API to feed new data if you have a weather station: http://openweathermap.org/stations

There doesn't seem to be any indication of usage limits on the API or a pricing structure (i.e free is 500 hits/hr). Free APIs are cool but expensive to run. Where is the money coming from to fund this service?

looks kinda cool... I do a lot of weather scraping ( http://warningweather.com ) and have actually just secured a direct connection to AWIPS (the national weather service's computer system).

I really love the idea of you service and will sign up for it tomorrow for some future projects. My biggest concern is your data being contaminated by home weather stations.... those stations tend to be pretty wack and can just really mess up your data set.

What does securing a direct connection to AWIPS entail? Sounds neat.

I don't know much about this stuff but I love the idea of contributing data.

Can anyone with a bit more clue tell me if something along the lines of a DVB-T Stick (great for contributing local ADS-B data to fr24.com) exists in the meterological world?

Basically a cheap (< €150) setup that would let me capture some simple data (temp, windspeed, humidity) and get it into a raspi (or similar)?

Check out the list of personal weather station vendors at weather underground[1]. I am not sure about the price but I think I would have remembered if the prices were over your budget.

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/setup.asp#hardwar...

Thanks!

I played with this a few weeks ago and made a little python thingy, that prints the weather based on geoip: https://github.com/fs111/geoip-weather

In Australia access to a free weather API is scarce. I've had to resort to writing scraping scripts in the past, hopefully OpenWeatherMap means I don't have to scrape sites any more and have access to a nice free API.

http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml ?

I didn't actually know this existed, but even looking at this page yields a dissatisfying result. The feeds look like they don't provide nearly as much information and the confusing and archaic feed formats as well. What is wrong with a straight up JSON api?

This is excellent. Hi from Stormpulse; welcome to the weather fold.

Neat service. I have a typo to report: If you try to create an account that already exists, it says "name alredy exist."

I also noticed that it seems the text on the site was not written by a native English-speaker. Editing is needed.

That seems a better way to spell that word anyway. Let's start a campaign to eliminate unpronounced characters from the English language. Who's with me?!

This looks epic, but is awfully scant on details: eg. where the worldwide precipitation data coming from, and how current is it?

It's written on the frontpage "Weather data is recieved from global meterological broadcast services and more than 40 000 weather stations." http://openweathermap.org/sys

I came here to ask the same question and I saw the 40k number you mention and I visited the page you link to. The occassional blinking light on a google map does not really answer the question of how they accumulated data from 40,000 weather stations.

I got the following error when I tried the layer station link[1]:

  ×Ошибка 404 (depricated function, see more http://openweathermap.org/wiki/API/JSON_API)

Ошибка is russian for error/mistake.

[1] http://openweathermap.org/layer-station

there is an upload api http://openweathermap.org/stations so I guess they scrap/connect 'global meterological broadcast services' and invite stations to submit their data.

I do not like guessing. Trust, verify yada yada.

Given the alternatives, NOAA (my preferred source but obviously american-centric) or WeatherUnderground I see no reason to use a service I need to make guesses about.

I'm signed up in the hopes that I'll get grandfathered into better rates when you scale

This is amazing, I've been waiting for this.

password field is clean ?

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