This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm. I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating fo…
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm. I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating fo…
ECMWF is what you are after. It's usually better than GFS.
You could also let the user choose which model to use or show a comparison.
I'm doing something related and my next step is compare models vs current weather to see which I model is more accurate.
As models change and sometimes depend on current conditions this is something that you should never stop doing (comparing which model is better)
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free HTTP/JSON weather API that covers the globe. No signup required. https://developer.yr.no
Does it have equally good data as WeatherKit? I vaguely remember that yr.no shows raw ECMWF data. WeatherKit probably provides weather.com data, which are postprocessed from ECMWF and perhaps other models and they provide the best forecasts. The main issue with raw model data is that they are not adjusted for local altitude.
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm. I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating fo…
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm. I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating fo…
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
Disagree, if he's only interested in producing a better forecast for his location.
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
If you’re just building a website for the weather forecast of one place, you don’t really need a tech stack. Completely static HTML maybe with a couple SVG weather symbols updated hourly to daily will do. Every single programming language can do the simple HTML templating needed for that; at worst you just print some strings.
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm. I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating fo…
ECMWF is what you are after. It's usually better than GFS. You could also let the user choose which model to use or show a comparison. I'm doing something related and my next step is compare models vs current weather to see which I model is more accurate. As models change and sometimes depend on current conditions this is something that you should never stop doing (comparing which model is better)
We'd like to have our website display comparisons, so people can see how much more accurate we are than other websites. Not sure whether there are IP rules that would stop us from displaying someone else's forecasts though. Don't want to land in hot water for some simple summer project!
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
I had the same thoughts (that it would be easy to improve on my local area's forecasts) and considered toying with it too, just for fun.
Are there any resources you'd recommend looking at? Also, if you have any interest in sharing your algorithm I'd love to take a look.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
If you’re just building a website for the weather forecast of one place, you don’t really need a tech stack. Completely static HTML maybe with a couple SVG weather symbols updated hourly to daily will do. Every single programming language can do the simple HTML templating needed for that; at worst you just print some strings.
I was hoping to include a few neighboring towns, but I did wonder if I could use static HTML with a dropdown menu to select the proper town. I wouldn't need to update frequently, just a couple times a day. I'd love to find a template for something along these lines, since as I mentioned, I'm extremely rusty! I have found some "build a weather website" tutorials, and I was planning to start with one of those.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
I had the same thoughts (that it would be easy to improve on my local area's forecasts) and considered toying with it too, just for fun. Are there any resources you'd recommend looking at? Also, if you have any interest in sharing your algorithm I'd love to take a look.
Happy to chat — contact in profile! In terms of resources, I've just been looking at "build your first website" tutorials that happen to use a weather website as the example. We've been focused on gathering data to create/validate our algo up to now, so just turning to the tech stack as this new API is released. Perfect timing!