Weather in Google Maps • Hacker News Board

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#11

Post by ac3522 » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:17 PM UTC

masonhensley wrote: post #8

The thing about weather sites is that they usually overwhelm users with information. 80%+ of the time, a user wants to know, will i need a coat or umbrella today? Or the general temperature. Thankfully, the weather channel has cleaned up forecasts (was once a huge mess): http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/37202 Love this site: http://www.thefuckingweather.com/ I hope google make this available in their api as an o…

I totally agree with the information overload. I usually use http://weather.ericson.net/

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#12

Post by wensing » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:21 PM UTC

masonhensley wrote: post #8

The thing about weather sites is that they usually overwhelm users with information. 80%+ of the time, a user wants to know, will i need a coat or umbrella today? Or the general temperature. Thankfully, the weather channel has cleaned up forecasts (was once a huge mess): http://www.weather.com/weather/tenday/37202 Love this site: http://www.thefuckingweather.com/ I hope google make this available in their api as an o…

Have you seen Stormpulse? Our goal is to eliminate information overload even when the weather gets nasty.

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#13

Post by ac3522 » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:24 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

What I'd really like is a weather API - I just spent 2 hours looking into a decent one to use. (The National Weather Service doesn't seem to report the current temperature. :/)

I still haven't been able to find an API to get yesterday's weather. I've been trying to make a site that doesn't show straight up temperature but a percentage based on known value (yesterday's temp).

For current conditions, you could try YQL, but I'm not sure if it's really current. (A good article: http://developer.yahoo.com/blogs/ydn/posts/2009/12/extending...)

The NOAA service (http://www.weather.gov/forecasts/xml/rest.php) that I've used before just does time series, so you might be able to get the most recent time, but you're right, I haven't been able to find a NOAA API for current data.

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#14

Post by jcurbo » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 9:55 PM UTC

pavel_lishin wrote: post #4

What I'd really like is a weather API - I just spent 2 hours looking into a decent one to use. (The National Weather Service doesn't seem to report the current temperature. :/)

Maybe Weather Underground? http://wiki.wunderground.com/index.php/API_-_XML looks decent. I use their regular pages all the time.

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#15

Post by awj » Thu, Aug 18, 2011, 11:46 PM UTC

It's interesting to see they're pre-rendering the composition of the weather layer on top of their regular map. Where I work we have our own styled map tiles and probably would do a layer of transparent cloud tiles over our (unmodified) regular tiles. It just takes too long to re-render deeper scales.

That said, if I was serving up as many tiles as google does, I'd go for it this way too. You already need a buttload of resources just to handle the request volume, might as well exploit that to save the user on download time and yourself on bandwidth.

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#16

Post by bjg » Fri, Aug 19, 2011, 1:22 AM UTC

mrinterweb wrote: post #2

This is a very nice feature, but I think I still prefer http://www.wunderground.com/auto/wxmap/ This page also has the ability to see where percipitation is currently. I find that this helps with my bike commute in Portland frequently.

Also reachable at http://fullscreenweather.com

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#17

Post by wensing » Fri, Aug 19, 2011, 1:55 AM UTC

wensing wrote: post #10

Have been waiting for this since early 2005. Now I wonder when they'll take a stab at severe weather.

My educated guess is years from now if ever. There's no worldwide severe weather dataset, so any foray into that market would look half-baked or worse, biased towards first-world countries (ie nations with good metereological data).

Re: Weather in Google Maps

#18

Post by wensing » Fri, Aug 19, 2011, 3:17 AM UTC

awj wrote: post #15

It's interesting to see they're pre-rendering the composition of the weather layer on top of their regular map. Where I work we have our own styled map tiles and probably would do a layer of transparent cloud tiles over our (unmodified) regular tiles. It just takes too long to re-render deeper scales. That said, if I was serving up as many tiles as google does, I'd go for it this way too. You already need a buttload…

At Stormpulse we also bake the cloud layer into the base tiles.