Can confirm pirateweather.net's forecast API working as a drop-in replacement for DarkSky's. I was able to fix a soon to be broken DarkSky bitbar script by just replacing the URLs/API keys to pirateweather's in under 5 minutes.
> Why "PirateWeather"? I've always thought that the HRRR model was pronounced the same way as the classic pirate "ARRR". Also, there is one company out there that thinks APIs can be copyrighted, which might apply here.
This answers the first question I had upon seeing the name, which was, is it free, open, documented and legal? Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably".
Very commendable effort, and I hope the project can last. It seems to be very difficult to maintain a free and reliable weather API so hopefully the dev is not biting off more than he can chew.
I'm the dev behind this, so always great to hear things like this! I really struggled to try to come up with a name. My first thought was "Bright Ground" (opposite of Dark Sky), but that seemed a little too on the nose. Luckily, the legal aspect of this (I'm in the clear!) was pretty well settled after the final Oracle v. Google case, but at the time was a big enough deal that it seemed relevant, and the HRRR model was another plus. I should update that README though, since it's now very definitely legal!
I agree, PirateWeather seems like a misbrand here. When I read it, i thought it was stealing weather data or something. On the web, the term "pirate" generally doesn't mean good things. This name almost implies that it is illegal or something.
I'm imagining designing a software product around this and presenting it to a C-Level, explaining that we use "PirateWeather" and I think I'm going to get grilled with lots of questions and concerns based on the name alone.
This is a good service and should be "branded" with a better name. Maybe a play on the whole DarkSky name like LightSky or "Sunset" which works exceptionally well since DarkSky was sunset by Apple. Maybe StarrySky, LateSky, NewSky.
I am usually someone who says that names don't matter as much as people think they do, but PirateWeather just seems like a huge hit in the wrong direction. But the product is solid so maybe it can survive despite the name.
> Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably".
Why do you draw that conclusion? It seemed to be making a joke about the fact that APIs are NOT copyrightable and considered fair use. The site is pretty clearly fully legal.
As an Australian, my main issue with almost all Weather API's and services is that the data is almost always sub-par to the weather data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). It would be great if there was a backend provider concept, so that I could tell my devices (such as an iPhone) to only use BOM data for it's inbuilt widgets.
It’s truly maddening as an Aussie. How many apps just ignore the BoM? I expected the Apple one not to, but it does. It’s frustrating when friends visit me and check the weather on their phone and the data for the Google and Apple apps is so bad.
I use Willy weather that uses bom. I don’t love it though. Any recommendations? I personally can’t stand the actual BoM app as an iPhone user but I appreciate that they tried…
For my own projects I end up using the WillyWeather APIs as they have a generous free tier and use BOM data - but yeah absolutely echo your complaints, I've seen Google up to 4 degrees off BOM/ my own weather station.
I can’t remember the name but there was a weather feed that was a pretty super aggregate of many feeds and it allowed for a higher level of accuracy to say take different individual values or blend as you might need.
This is a timely post and comment as I’ve been thinking of solving a weather problem I have with that feed. Hoping the hn hive brain might have seen the same.
I was really hoping https://merrysky.net/ had a graphical forecast similar to weather underground's 10 day. I've yet to find anything else that quickly shows everything you'd want to know in a single image. Even the mouseover timeline is perfection. It is so good and seemingly exclusive to WU that I sometimes wonder if they hold a patent for it.
The _presentation_ is impressive, but the forecast is often the raw output from various models, and thus not entirely reliable. For example, I live in a valley where most forecast models smooth over giving more snow/cold than we ever get.
Came here, like I come to every weather API/tool discussion, to ask the same thing ... I would really like a less spammy, less bloated 10-day forecast a la WU.
This comes close, however - there's a nice 7-day lookahead ... is it possible that WU is just fudging days 8-9-10 and no real data is available beyond 7 days ?
I found this old blog article at a high level on how Dark Sky works... about 12 years old now. I always loved this app and was kind of sad when Apple acquired them... but to have Apple come in and just buy your app out is probably a great feeling for the founders :)
Good question! It's the same underlying models, but three key differences:
1. Pirate Weather returns data following the Dark Sky syntax, as opposed to the custom NWS format.
2. Pirate Weather has global coverage, the NWS API is only for the US.
3. The NWS one uses human forecasters to come up with their forecasts, compared to Pirate Weather's use of raw model results.
> All weather data comes from the AWS open data program https://registry.opendata.aws/collab/noaa/. This is a fantastic program, since it is more reliable than the NOAA distribution, and means there are no data transfer changes!
It's going to be a tangential comment but I work in science research that's adjacent to weather forecasting and I find the political/technical jockeying that is happening with forecasting to be fascinating. It's a nexus of capitalism, federal government spending, politics, and technology that has very real implications for individual Americans.
In summary: horrible oversight by the federal govt (read, congress) of our technical/scientific forecasting resources means that our forecasting ability is extremely fragmented and poorly organized. This has lead to a lot of companies being essentially resellers of public data. These companies claim to create a lot of value added products ('cleaner APIs', 'minutecasts', etc etc) that are either scientifically dubious or technically simple and then these companies walk away with huge profits based on being a portal to government data.
It's so American it is almost laughable, all while the European ECMWF eats our lunch in terms of accuracy even for the CONUS. I've discussed this on technical internet forums often enough that I can practically already write the replies to my own comment. "What's the problem with that?" etc et al. But the reality of it is that it's emblematic of how politically broken the US is, in particular with regards to the agencies in charge of scientific products and funding. Not to mention the concrete problems with the forecast products themselves.
Anyway. Good luck pirate weather and godspeed. Information was meant to be free and open, especially the forecast. It's such a laughably simple problem that could/should be so easily solved but, alas, there is money to be made!
There is enormous data available at https://www.weather.gov/ at no charge, including hourly and weekly forecasts, spot forecasts, radar (multiple layers, with/without animation) and satellite (multiple layers, with/without animation), plus storm watches, hurricane info, historical data, climate data…
I guess it's nice that apps can do things like advise me that it might start raining in a few minutes, but often by the time I see those alerts, the water on my head has alerted me anyway.
All other weather apps, it seems to me, are for little more than tracking my location and serving me relevant ads.
As one who wrote (over 10 years ago, still improving it) and sells a weather app targeted at storm chasers, weather enthusiasts and spotters... I find the NWS data to be fragmented, often based on ancient computing standards (look at how NEXRAD data is formatted - it's binary for a 16-bit computer), and very hard to find documentation on.
Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.
And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.
The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.
But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).
I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).
Have any nerdy Congresspeople wanted to solve this ridiculous inefficiency in recent years. Seems like a natural "the Europeans kick our ass at forecasting" message would go over well and potentially negate the lobbying from Weather Channel and others with a vested interest in perpetuating this stupid situation.
As someone living in continental Europe there’s one thing I haven’t found anything remotely close to NHC quality forecasts. Curious what you think of that institution?
I’ve used https://open-meteo.com/ before and I think it’s the same type of open data being exposed.
These types of projects are great for stuff like home automation. I’m using to to improve my predictions for power generation (PV) and consumption (heat pump). Planning to is ergst to optimize home battery charging in the future.
(Disclaimer; open sourced a small go library for open meteo, but otherwise not affiliated)
Hi, creator of open-meteo.com here! I am using a more wide range of weather models to better cover Europe, Northern Africa and Asia. North America is covered as well with GFS+HRRR and even weather models from the Canadian weather service.
In contrast to pirate weather, I am using compressed local files to more easily run API nodes, without getting a huge AWS bill. Compression is especially important for large historical weather datasets like ERA5 or the 10 km version ERA5-Land.
I've got a bunch of moving parts in my system, including realtime (5-minutely) energy pricing. If it looks like it's going to be cloudy tomorrow I put my thumb on the scales to make it more likely that my system will buy power from the grid to top off the battery so I can ride through any price spikes.
I don't have the stats chops to determine whether I'm actually saving any money with this approach, but it sure is a lot of fun.
I usually use forecase.weather.gov They provide a nice textual weather page, with English, for next 7 or 8 days [1]. But it is tiring to open 3 or 4 bookmarks, so I thought to consume that as json & make a single page html app with ajax requests. Its still in progress, I spent few minutes yesterday. The surprising thing was (I was ready to fetch the html text & parse it, difficult), I simply changed one parameter to JSON & I got json [2]. I didn't find any easy to find documentation about json endpoint. My plan is to have city abbreviations on top in horizontal menu, then each click fetches json, puts it into div below.
That is cool the web front end exposes itself as JSON as well, good tip.
FWIW, they also have a pretty decent API. Its based around zones though, which you'd need to look up. So from that lat and lon, you'd get the zone from:
The API is in a JSON-LD format so its got a lot of links to related topics in the actual JSON payload. Looking at the JSON can make it somewhat easy to feel out what you need. The documentation is here:
This is great. Can endorse LuckGrib for IoS folks as well. Great UI and can pull NOAA and EU models. https://luckgrib.com/. Not FOSS but worth the $20 I paid once several years ago. Popular among wind sports enthusiasts many of who are hobbyist meteorologists.
[+] [-] pca2|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] nomilk|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dzhiurgis|3 years ago|reply
Please fork it for us lazy ones
[+] [-] nerdponx|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] NoboruWataya|3 years ago|reply
This answers the first question I had upon seeing the name, which was, is it free, open, documented and legal? Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably".
Very commendable effort, and I hope the project can last. It seems to be very difficult to maintain a free and reliable weather API so hopefully the dev is not biting off more than he can chew.
[+] [-] kxrm|3 years ago|reply
I think it says something that we live in a world where NOAA data could be seen as an underground or less than legal means of getting the weather.
Perhaps AccuWeather has been successful in their campaign to keep free weather data as obscure as possible.
[+] [-] alexander0042|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jacurtis|3 years ago|reply
I'm imagining designing a software product around this and presenting it to a C-Level, explaining that we use "PirateWeather" and I think I'm going to get grilled with lots of questions and concerns based on the name alone.
This is a good service and should be "branded" with a better name. Maybe a play on the whole DarkSky name like LightSky or "Sunset" which works exceptionally well since DarkSky was sunset by Apple. Maybe StarrySky, LateSky, NewSky.
I am usually someone who says that names don't matter as much as people think they do, but PirateWeather just seems like a huge hit in the wrong direction. But the product is solid so maybe it can survive despite the name.
[+] [-] paxys|3 years ago|reply
Why do you draw that conclusion? It seemed to be making a joke about the fact that APIs are NOT copyrightable and considered fair use. The site is pretty clearly fully legal.
[+] [-] Humphrey|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ace2358|3 years ago|reply
I use Willy weather that uses bom. I don’t love it though. Any recommendations? I personally can’t stand the actual BoM app as an iPhone user but I appreciate that they tried…
R.I.P Pocket Weather :(
[+] [-] l3_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] j45|3 years ago|reply
This is a timely post and comment as I’ve been thinking of solving a weather problem I have with that feed. Hoping the hn hive brain might have seen the same.
[+] [-] jron|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] PraetorianGourd|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] chrisweekly|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] xd1936|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rswerve|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] rsync|3 years ago|reply
Came here, like I come to every weather API/tool discussion, to ask the same thing ... I would really like a less spammy, less bloated 10-day forecast a la WU.
This comes close, however - there's a nice 7-day lookahead ... is it possible that WU is just fudging days 8-9-10 and no real data is available beyond 7 days ?
[+] [-] traceroute66|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] zmk_|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] tomaskafka|3 years ago|reply
Link: https://weathergraph.app
Screenshots: https://impresskit.net/6430c7f0-b34b-418f-9824-f386f939be9a/...
What do you think?
[+] [-] meliorize|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] datalus|3 years ago|reply
Anyhow, here's the url:
https://jackadam.github.io/2011/how-dark-sky-works
[+] [-] DotaFan|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ourmandave|3 years ago|reply
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
Or is this a friendlier overlay of their interface?
[+] [-] alexander0042|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] cantaloupe|3 years ago|reply
> All weather data comes from the AWS open data program https://registry.opendata.aws/collab/noaa/. This is a fantastic program, since it is more reliable than the NOAA distribution, and means there are no data transfer changes!
[+] [-] maliker|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] earthscienceman|3 years ago|reply
In summary: horrible oversight by the federal govt (read, congress) of our technical/scientific forecasting resources means that our forecasting ability is extremely fragmented and poorly organized. This has lead to a lot of companies being essentially resellers of public data. These companies claim to create a lot of value added products ('cleaner APIs', 'minutecasts', etc etc) that are either scientifically dubious or technically simple and then these companies walk away with huge profits based on being a portal to government data.
It's so American it is almost laughable, all while the European ECMWF eats our lunch in terms of accuracy even for the CONUS. I've discussed this on technical internet forums often enough that I can practically already write the replies to my own comment. "What's the problem with that?" etc et al. But the reality of it is that it's emblematic of how politically broken the US is, in particular with regards to the agencies in charge of scientific products and funding. Not to mention the concrete problems with the forecast products themselves.
Anyway. Good luck pirate weather and godspeed. Information was meant to be free and open, especially the forecast. It's such a laughably simple problem that could/should be so easily solved but, alas, there is money to be made!
[+] [-] jmbwell|3 years ago|reply
There is enormous data available at https://www.weather.gov/ at no charge, including hourly and weekly forecasts, spot forecasts, radar (multiple layers, with/without animation) and satellite (multiple layers, with/without animation), plus storm watches, hurricane info, historical data, climate data…
I guess it's nice that apps can do things like advise me that it might start raining in a few minutes, but often by the time I see those alerts, the water on my head has alerted me anyway.
All other weather apps, it seems to me, are for little more than tracking my location and serving me relevant ads.
[+] [-] mesoman|3 years ago|reply
Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.
And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.
The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.
But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).
I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).
[+] [-] billiam|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] baq|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] FatActor|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ushakov|3 years ago|reply
I'm wondering how much your monthly bill is?
[+] [-] hectormalot|3 years ago|reply
These types of projects are great for stuff like home automation. I’m using to to improve my predictions for power generation (PV) and consumption (heat pump). Planning to is ergst to optimize home battery charging in the future.
(Disclaimer; open sourced a small go library for open meteo, but otherwise not affiliated)
[+] [-] meteo-jeff|3 years ago|reply
In contrast to pirate weather, I am using compressed local files to more easily run API nodes, without getting a huge AWS bill. Compression is especially important for large historical weather datasets like ERA5 or the 10 km version ERA5-Land.
Let me know if you have any questions!
[+] [-] tjhowse|3 years ago|reply
I've got a bunch of moving parts in my system, including realtime (5-minutely) energy pricing. If it looks like it's going to be cloudy tomorrow I put my thumb on the scales to make it more likely that my system will buy power from the grid to top off the battery so I can ride through any price spikes.
I don't have the stats chops to determine whether I'm actually saving any money with this approach, but it sure is a lot of fun.
[+] [-] davchana|3 years ago|reply
1. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.78&lon=-122...
2. https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.98&lon=-120...
[+] [-] vel0city|3 years ago|reply
FWIW, they also have a pretty decent API. Its based around zones though, which you'd need to look up. So from that lat and lon, you'd get the zone from:
https://api.weather.gov/points/37.7827,-120.38
Using the zone information, you can get to a forecast:
https://api.weather.gov/gridpoints/STO/72,24/forecast
If you're wanting the current observations, you'd pick a station for that grid such as MOUC1 and go to its observations/latest endpoint:
https://api.weather.gov/stations/MOUC1/observations/latest
The API is in a JSON-LD format so its got a lot of links to related topics in the actual JSON payload. Looking at the JSON can make it somewhat easy to feel out what you need. The documentation is here:
https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
[+] [-] ChrisArchitect|3 years ago|reply
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191
[+] [-] none_to_remain|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wendyshu|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] pbmango|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] kish15|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] wohfab|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] WoodenChair|3 years ago|reply
https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi
I created the start of a Python wrapper for WeatherKit, if anyone is interested in helping with that effort:
https://github.com/davecom/PyWeatherKit
[+] [-] vorpalhex|3 years ago|reply
Right now there are thousands of weather stations posting regular reports via APRS.
Any chance to see those integrated?
[+] [-] Dentrax|3 years ago|reply