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Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

open-meteo.com

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Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#91

Post by leifdenby »

kqr wrote: post #80

One thing I'm missing from virtually every weather service is access to ensemble forecasts. Meteorologists internally deal in ensemble forecasts, but never, as far as I know, publish them. All public data has been condensed down to a single forecast. The ensemble forecast would -- I imagine -- give me an idea of the internal variability of the forecast for a single hour/day, which I could feed into my personal loss f…

The ECMWF provide meteograms which show the ensemble spread for their global forecasts: https://www.ecmwf.int/en/forecasts/charts/web/classical_mete.... That webpage has a lot is great visualisations

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#92

Post by meteo-jeff »

classichasclass wrote: post #55

I respect and appreciate no API key being needed, but how will you prevent excessive usage? I'll just say that it's been a battle on my end to stop people abusing APIs I deploy. It's why we can't have nice things.

This is indeed a concern to me.

As others pointed out, blocking IP addresses is an option. Blocking access based on the HTTP Origin header is also possible.

I hope I can go on for some time without being to restrictive. With a fairly quick API that can scale with cheap VMs it should be feasible to keep it running at low expenses even at higher utilisation.

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#93

Post by meteo-jeff »

modeless wrote: post #54
meteo-jeff wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for pointing me towards ASTC HDR. I did not know this one. Compression will be an important part to build a longer historic database. I tested zstd, but it only had a ratio of 30%. Currently I am using fixed size files, because I update all weather data "in-place". I can calculate which bytes to read for a given geographic location. If data is compressed, this would be very hard to do.

Yes, this is why I suggested compressed textures, they are fixed size too. You know exactly which bytes to read (or write) for any given pixel. But they can still achieve high compression ratios assuming the data is suitable, which I expect weather data is.

Now I got it! Sorry, I did not get your point in the beginning. Compressed textures could be really interesting. So far I have no experience in this regard, but I will look into it

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#94

Post by leifdenby »

meteo-jeff wrote: post #88
kqr wrote: post #80

One thing I'm missing from virtually every weather service is access to ensemble forecasts. Meteorologists internally deal in ensemble forecasts, but never, as far as I know, publish them. All public data has been condensed down to a single forecast. The ensemble forecast would -- I imagine -- give me an idea of the internal variability of the forecast for a single hour/day, which I could feed into my personal loss f…

Including ensemble forecasts into Open-Meteo is already on my backlog. And yes, this will return those 90% confidence intervals. Forecast variability is difficult to express. For example precipitation probability describes how likely rain is given the forecasted atmospheric conditions. Instead some people assume it is raining in 10% of an area. Making use of probabilities it also tricky. If you run an ice cream shop,…

You could store the standard deviation as well as the mean (or median) of the ensemble. That would maximally double your data volume (but would add quite a bit less with compression). The UK Met Office have done same nice work into how to optimally combine the severity and risk of an event into an impact measure

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#95

Post by MariusE »

asaddhamani wrote: post #87

Does anyone know where I can get accurate weather data from remote locations (in India)? I've been meaning to do some analysis on historical weather data to try and understand the impact of climate change, and all the open APIs I have tried have inaccurate data. Data for Manali in India: https://api.open-meteo.com/v1/forecast?latitude=32.2432&long... When the actual low is 12 celsius and high is 20 celsius, this show…

You can check the Norwegian service Yr.no.

https://www.yr.no/en/details/table/2-1263968/India/Tamil%20N... https://hjelp.yr.no/hc/en-us/articles/360001940793-Free-weat...

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#96

Post by meteo-jeff »

jareklupinski wrote: post #74

Thank you! I found you some time ago in a Github list of free APIs; you made it possible for me to finish my design for a "smart" umbrella hook https://github.com/jareklupinski/umbrella-hook I'm updating the code now to parse your weathercode for predicting umbrella necessity, and has been an accurate meter in my area for the past week.

That's cool :) I like this idea.

Yes, please use the WMO weather code for that. I will also add precipitation probability in the next weeks. At >50% precipitation probability the umbrella hook light could also switch on.

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#97

Post by meteo-jeff »

jxy wrote: post #72

What is the license of the data from the German weather service you are repackaging? Would that conflict with your ToS?

DWD is quite unrestricted. Data is also processed, mixed with different models and many weather variables are calculated afterwards using other models. It is not showing raw data directly.

As far as I interpret terms correctly, I have to indicate that I am using open-data from DWD, but for value added services, this attribution is not required for all applications using it. I will do some additional research in this regard, whether applications using Open-Meteo should also display a disclaimer.

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#98

Post by meteo-jeff »

keithnz wrote: post #75

the non commercial use is interesting, because facts aren't copyrightable, in fact, weather data is often the exemplar case used for non copyrightable facts. It seems to me really easy to strip the data of this of this limitation through a proxy. Or is there a legal way to ripple the non commercial limitation?

I chose the "Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0)" license to start the project without worrying about legal issues. Because the API is offered without API key restrictions, it could also be abused.

The legal way to remove the non-commercial limitation, is to "ask" if your company can use it.

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#99

Post by meteo-jeff »

_oydo wrote: post #56

Your license requirements are unenforceable. App developers can create apps that automate requests against your endpoints without having to agree to your ToS. Even if you add an account and API key system, as long as it's free to sign up, apps can also automatically register accounts to get API keys.

Correct. This cannot be prevented.

Also for API keys you can just search for keys from basically any weather API and you will find credentials on GitHub. People also sign up 10x for free API services to circumvent typical request limits per day.

At some point I may have to block certain IP addresses or HTTP Origin referrers because of abuse.

Re: Show HN: Weather API for non-commercial use

#100

Post by kqr »

pathseeker wrote: post #84
kqr wrote: post #80

One thing I'm missing from virtually every weather service is access to ensemble forecasts. Meteorologists internally deal in ensemble forecasts, but never, as far as I know, publish them. All public data has been condensed down to a single forecast. The ensemble forecast would -- I imagine -- give me an idea of the internal variability of the forecast for a single hour/day, which I could feed into my personal loss f…

didn't dark sky used to show these uncertainty ranges?

Some providers do it only for long-term forecasts, but not daily or hourly. Dark Sky might have been one of those.
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