195 karma · joined September 12, 2021
Socials: - github.com/patrick-zippenfenig
Interests: Open Source, Outdoor Activities, Data Science, Fitness
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This is not ideal for shared hosting services like cloudflare workers, but is the easiest and privacy-friendly way to limit access to fair-use.
Additionally, weather data is uploaded to a AWS S3 open-data sponsorship and you can run your own API instances (even commercially). The only draw back is, that a lot of data needs to transferred. I am working on a S3 cloud-native approach, but it is still in testing.
The free tier is cross-financed by commercial customers that use the service for energy forecasting, agriculture planing or wild fire prevention. There is no external funding, VCs, or whatsoever, the code is build in public on GitHub and I intent to continue running the free API service as is.
The core tech is tuned for performance, using local gridded files instead of a traditional database or response caching. This efficiency is what allows it to stay free.
You can try it here: https://open-meteo.com
Under the hood Open-Meteo is using a custom file format with time-series chunking and specialised compression for low-frequency weather data. General purpose time-series databases do not even get close to this setup.
The future of weather forecasting is likely to rely heavily on AI models. The article discusses Pangu Weather and HN comments mention GraphCast as examples. Interestingly, on the first of March, the European weather forecast center ECMWF released their new AI weather model AIFS as open data. This model is not only more accurate than their existing numerical model, but also requires significantly less computing power to run. They've published comparisons showing AIFS outperforms other models in terms of forecast precision: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/about/media-centre/aifs-blog/2024/f...
My goal is to make weather data easily accessible, providing information from the past 80 years or forecasts for up to one month. All the data is sourced from reputable national weather services and is based on open-data. While I offer commercial subscriptions to support Open-Meteo's servers, my primary focus is on open-data and open-access. For this commitment, I'm actively working on redistributing the entire Open-Meteo weather dataset as open-data through an AWS Open Data Sponsorship.
In the coming months, my plans include integrating seasonal weather forecasts spanning up to 8 months, incorporating more historical ocean wave data, and improving integrations in Python, Swift, Kotlin, Typescript, and other programming languages.
Let me know if you have any questions!
Thanks for the free promotion opportunity!