For any other person who wants more advanced weather, I like meteo-blue's multimodel graphs https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/multimodel/tex...
Much more information dense, if less pretty but it's helpful to see a bunch of models to get a sense of the uncertainty. It's what meteorologists I know do often, and you can quickly learn which models are short vs long-term and uncheck them
I do wish I could make my own graphs but parsing all the different weather models is a pain, maybe there's some API I don't know about or an open source consistent parser
Instead of showing multiple models, I prefer they run the same model multiple times with slightly different starting conditions. And then show error (probability) bands.
This (and every other Dark Sky replacement I've tried) is missing one feature that is crucial to me: hour-by-hour barometric pressure forecast.
I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so significant that it has impacted my overall quality of life.
FYI, the iOS Weather app does have this now. If you click on a day in the 10-day forecast, you get a detail view with hour-by-hour forecast data for many metrics. One of them is pressure (although I don't normally look at barometric pressure so maybe this different than what you need).
Edit: You can also click on the "pressure" widget and it brings up the same hour-by-hour detail view.
Only tested on the Desktop but I'm finding I have to do a bit more work (vs MerrySky) - that is, I have to keep clicking each day.
Usability could be improved if today's weather information bar automatically displayed when accessing the page. Maybe the settings could add a toggle ON option for:
Unfortunately, the NWS API is missing machine readable condition codes/icons in the daily and hourly forecast, which is why it isn't available in briefsky. The API has nearly everything else, though. If I had a solution for those icons, I probably would have added support for their weather alerts too, and also made it the default for US locations.
I miss the dark sky alerts indicating that its about start raining in the next x number of minutes at my location and how long the rain will continue. Was great when I was about to step out for an errand and could wait until it stopped raining.
Can someone explain to me why weather data is seemingly hard to get/provide? Isn’t data from the US government (weather.gov) in the public domain and completely free? What did Dark Sky and similar provide on top?
The answer is that it is not hard to get. The problem is that you are asking web developers not weather scientists.
The US provides free updated every 15 minute forecast for an absurd number of weather variables for every 3km square of the US in a nice GRIB file package. It is the gold standard on the free domain. Want a real api? Be prepared to pay real money. All Darksky did on top of this was interpolate that forecast data across time and the map.
Without an actual meteorologist on hand to guide the process, the forecast is probably going to be bad. NOAA and the weather community are just fine with the bar being high for entry. A proliferation of low effort/poor forecast web sites would just lead to them removing the realtime data from the public domain.
Relative to the prediction side (which Dark Sky is arguably most known for): Every day, NOAA collects billions of data points (20 TB) of data about the planet's weather, and throws it into their supercomputers to make a forecast. NOAA has the 49th and 50th fastest computers in the world. In fact, the two major applications of the original supercomputers were nuclear physics and the weather.
They make it all available at https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets, but as noted - since the data is so incredibly large and NOAAs already running stats on it... you can't really outcompute them.
[There are very very few CS applications with both a) more computing power and b) more real world impact than predicting weather and hurricanes. Maybe cancer research.]
For me, it was the history data. I could check if it snowed in the last couple days in a new location and whether it melted yet. With most weather apps, the furthest back I can see is midnight, which does not even answer the question of whether there are going to be puddles/snow/slush/ice on the ground that formed since the time I went to sleep.
The main issue I ran into with the NWS API was a lack of stable conditions codes/icons (something like WMO codes that could be easily mapped). They encode some weird dynamic image URL that renders a summary of the weather, but isn't machine readable. I think they're deprecating it anyway. Otherwise, it had pretty much everything through one endpoint or another.
I agree this data should be free and easy to access from the government.
Personally, I've found weather.gov APIs hard to work with. There's no geocoding included, and you can't even use lat, lon directly. But the bigger dealbreaker is that I have about a ~10-20% success rate querying any given endpoint, where sometimes I just get "An unexpected problem has occurred." And this is an automated twice-a-day query, so I don't think I'm hitting any rate limits...
Small feature request; when I paste in from Google's "copy coordinates" feature, it could detect my paste contents are "coord,coord" and populate the form appropriately, splitting on the ",".
Would be nice if it automatically uses degrees Celcius instead of Fahrenheit if the location is Europe. Also for visibility and wind speed, km instead of mi.
I considered handling this with some coarse longitude heuristic, but settled on just using the browser's locale for now, so it should default to metric for non-US locales. In the metric setting, the visibility and wind speed will be km and km/h, respectively.
Love the app. Would love to use it on my iphone as a PWA but it seems to have a couple issues running on mobile:
1. The Example Weather Provider notification keeps popping up every time I refresh. It doesnt remember that I already closed it the last time
2. For some reason, on my phone it thinks that today is Saturday (today is Monday where I am) and its giving me the upcoming weeks weather starting with Sunday.
Very cool. Special kudos for the light and informative UI design.
One nitpick - with Geolocation option, if it is disabled at the browser level (all fields are greyed out), the app shows some forecast, but it's not clear for what location.
An idea - allow enabling multiple providers at once, have the app automatically validate their forecasts against the actual conditions and then, basically, rank them on accuracy. In theory this should allow determining providers that are good at forecasting for one's specific location.
Nice. A tip: as long as you're asking for position anyway, you might as well make the units default to the units used in that location. 99% of the time that's what we want.
Don't forget the clock, too. It's not quite as odd to use am/pm as it is to use imperial units, but it's still the wrong choice for all of Europe minus U.K.
Briefsky only offer Open-Meteo without an API key. This is a Europe Centric model (if they integrate HRRR, they don't state it anywhere I could find. I could be wrong) while MerrySky uses Pirateweather.net which among others does integrate the HRRR model, which is a US model and is higher resolution (3km vs 4km).
Yup, all good points. I've found Open-Meteo's default to be subpar for US. Briefsky offers Pirate Weather too, but will require a free API key. (MerrySky is Pirate Weather, so it's baked in.)
I was actually hoping to make NWS the default for US, but ran into some limitations with their API missing machine readable conditions codes/icons. Open-Meteo does have https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/gfs-api, which should probably be used in the meanwhile for a better default forecast with US locations.
I would suggest trying https://www.meteosource.com where you can get all data including 10 day forecast with a text description. There is a free plan for developers with 7 days forecast and a reasonably priced Flexi plan with full data.
I love the UI but it seems to be missing what location it has loaded for? I know it asks for it, it is useful for me to see what location it is reporting on.
Yeah, this probably requires some explanation. Currently, briefsky doesn't depend on a geocoding API, so it can't map locations to coordinates or vice-versa. It just uses the lat/long from the browser's geolocation or manual coordinates in the settings. But ideally it'll have location search and location text at the top.
The way I use it is as a bookmark with a pre-configured provider and the location in the title. briefsky stores all configuration in the URL, so you can bookmark multiple locations / providers.
JZL003|3 years ago
I do wish I could make my own graphs but parsing all the different weather models is a pain, maybe there's some API I don't know about or an open source consistent parser
amelius|3 years ago
JZL003|3 years ago
https://www.meteoblue.com/en/weather/forecast/meteogramweb/t...
When I look at science data I don't look at lists of numbers, I don't know why that's always how weather is presented visually
jnovek|3 years ago
I get frequent migraines and big changes in the weather trigger them. The easiest way to predict big changes is by watching for swings in the barometer. There's nothing out there that gives the hour-by-hour barometric pressure prediction (at least on iOS) and it's so significant that it has impacted my overall quality of life.
barometric|3 years ago
https://barometricpressure.today/
It’s currently tracking a lot of cities, so please check if you’re close to any, otherwise, I will soon add a search for specific locations.
I’m open to any feedback.
cnanney|3 years ago
npilk|3 years ago
Edit: You can also click on the "pressure" widget and it brings up the same hour-by-hour detail view.
cobythedog|3 years ago
perfecto_maduro|3 years ago
Anecdotally my headaches correlate with weather changes but was never able to pinpoint exactly the markers.
gwoplock|3 years ago
I think Carrot weather also has that feature
GiorgioG|3 years ago
O1111OOO|3 years ago
Now I have two that look great on the Desktop and easy on the eyes (ie; without the chaos I find on other sites):
https://merrysky.net/ and https://briefsky.app/
Only tested on the Desktop but I'm finding I have to do a bit more work (vs MerrySky) - that is, I have to keep clicking each day.
Usability could be improved if today's weather information bar automatically displayed when accessing the page. Maybe the settings could add a toggle ON option for:
(-) today only
(-) all days
Leftium|3 years ago
I'm trying to figure out a good way to add 60-min forecast (precipitation in next hour.)
vsergeev|3 years ago
zie|3 years ago
I never understood why people go through all these other API's that consistently get shut down, cancelled or become pay for use eventually.
vsergeev|3 years ago
See here for notes on other unsupported providers: https://github.com/vsergeev/briefsky#unsupported-providers
gpm|3 years ago
Which is really disappointing, since the weather models they use must model the entire world...
BrandoElFollito|3 years ago
nirav72|3 years ago
0cf8612b2e1e|3 years ago
meteo-jeff|3 years ago
It collects raw weather mode data and redistributes weather forecasts with simple APIs
Briefsky is also using it :)
redavni|3 years ago
The US provides free updated every 15 minute forecast for an absurd number of weather variables for every 3km square of the US in a nice GRIB file package. It is the gold standard on the free domain. Want a real api? Be prepared to pay real money. All Darksky did on top of this was interpolate that forecast data across time and the map.
Without an actual meteorologist on hand to guide the process, the forecast is probably going to be bad. NOAA and the weather community are just fine with the bar being high for entry. A proliferation of low effort/poor forecast web sites would just lead to them removing the realtime data from the public domain.
yackback|3 years ago
They make it all available at https://www.noaa.gov/nodd/datasets, but as noted - since the data is so incredibly large and NOAAs already running stats on it... you can't really outcompute them.
[There are very very few CS applications with both a) more computing power and b) more real world impact than predicting weather and hurricanes. Maybe cancer research.]
20TB source: https://www.nesdis.noaa.gov/news/data-dive-five-noaa-databas...
manwe150|3 years ago
vsergeev|3 years ago
For the others, I tried to document the main limitations here: https://github.com/vsergeev/briefsky#unsupported-providers
npilk|3 years ago
Personally, I've found weather.gov APIs hard to work with. There's no geocoding included, and you can't even use lat, lon directly. But the bigger dealbreaker is that I have about a ~10-20% success rate querying any given endpoint, where sometimes I just get "An unexpected problem has occurred." And this is an automated twice-a-day query, so I don't think I'm hitting any rate limits...
Zetice|3 years ago
Small feature request; when I paste in from Google's "copy coordinates" feature, it could detect my paste contents are "coord,coord" and populate the form appropriately, splitting on the ",".
vsergeev|3 years ago
Gys|3 years ago
vsergeev|3 years ago
udit99|3 years ago
1. The Example Weather Provider notification keeps popping up every time I refresh. It doesnt remember that I already closed it the last time
2. For some reason, on my phone it thinks that today is Saturday (today is Monday where I am) and its giving me the upcoming weeks weather starting with Sunday.
eps|3 years ago
One nitpick - with Geolocation option, if it is disabled at the browser level (all fields are greyed out), the app shows some forecast, but it's not clear for what location.
An idea - allow enabling multiple providers at once, have the app automatically validate their forecasts against the actual conditions and then, basically, rank them on accuracy. In theory this should allow determining providers that are good at forecasting for one's specific location.
vintermann|3 years ago
Don't forget the clock, too. It's not quite as odd to use am/pm as it is to use imperial units, but it's still the wrong choice for all of Europe minus U.K.
askvictor|3 years ago
sjoerger|3 years ago
redavni|3 years ago
vsergeev|3 years ago
I was actually hoping to make NWS the default for US, but ran into some limitations with their API missing machine readable conditions codes/icons. Open-Meteo does have https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/gfs-api, which should probably be used in the meanwhile for a better default forecast with US locations.
goplayoutside|3 years ago
When I checked the other day, it looked like Pirate Weather was still waiting on donations to fund the development work for that feature.
Luka78|3 years ago
KerryJones|3 years ago
vsergeev|3 years ago
The way I use it is as a bookmark with a pre-configured provider and the location in the title. briefsky stores all configuration in the URL, so you can bookmark multiple locations / providers.
WraithM|3 years ago
zikduruqe|3 years ago