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Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

briefsky.app

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Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#21

Post by vsergeev »

npilk wrote: post #20
0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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?

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 d…

You can use lat,lon with the points endpoint: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api , then properties.forecast and properties.forecastHourly endpoints from there to get daily and hourly forecasts. I don't have enough experience with it to comment on rate limiting, though.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#22

Post by JZL003 »

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

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#23

Post by JZL003 »

JZL003 wrote: post #22

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…

Also meteograms are a nice consise way of getting a sense of the weather

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

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#24

Post by JZL003 »

perfecto_maduro wrote: post #8
jnovek wrote: post #3

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 signific…

What kind of changes are you looking for? and how would knowing the forecast help you prepare or avoid headaches? Anecdotally my headaches correlate with weather changes but was never able to pinpoint exactly the markers.

yeah I've wondered too. Although I think for me I just feel better when it's colder

I did debate writing how 'headache'y I felt periodically with timestamps (e.g. make a telegram bot -> google sheet) and then add in some weather data and see if it was actually correlated if I plotted them

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#25

Post by O1111OOO »

For a long while, I had been looking for Weather Apps with great UIs. They seemed so hard to find.

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

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#27

Post by vsergeev »

Zetice wrote: post #5

Nice! 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 ",".

Thanks, I'll add it to my list. At some point I was thinking of adding a location search too, just depends on a free & reliable geocoding API.

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#28

Post by redavni »

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).

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#29

Post by meteo-jeff »

0cf8612b2e1e wrote: post #6

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?

That’s exactly what I want to change with my open source weather api https://open-meteo.com

It collects raw weather mode data and redistributes weather forecasts with simple APIs

Briefsky is also using it :)

Re: Show HN: Briefsky – a free Dark Sky clone for multiple weather APIs

#30

Post by vsergeev »

redavni wrote: post #28

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.

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