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Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

pirateweather.net

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Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#101

Post by phpisthebest »

jacurtis wrote: post #31
NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

> Why "PirateWeather"? I've always thought that the HRRR model was pronounced the same way as the classic pirate "ARRR". Also, there is one company out there that thinks APIs can be copyrighted, which might apply here. This answers the first question I had upon seeing the name, which was, is it free, open, documented and legal ? Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably". Very commendable effort, and I hope…

I agree, PirateWeather seems like a misbrand here. When I read it, i thought it was stealing weather data or something. On the web, the term "pirate" generally doesn't mean good things. This name almost implies that it is illegal or something. I'm imagining designing a software product around this and presenting it to a C-Level, explaining that we use "PirateWeather" and I think I'm going to get grilled with lots of…

>>I'm imagining designing a software product around this and presenting it to a C-Level

More likely

1. they will not ask

2. If they ask they will care

3. If they care they will not with a short explanation

this seem like a non-issue, and if the biggest thing you have to worry about is some C Level with a stick up their ..... well I think you have nothing to worry about then

the name is fine...

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#102

Post by phpisthebest »

Bloating wrote: post #92
alexander0042 wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm the dev for this, so can shed some light on this! Weather Underground was a pretty out there choice- I guess the kind of people who like putting together weather APIs aren't great at naming things. I considered "Bright Ground", and still have the domain name for it, so maybe it'd be worth spinning up another API endpoint/ branding that uses that and has a more commercial focus, keeping Pirate Weather as the free…

wunderground.com has existed for a long time. Defining feature it is can crowd source weather

That used to be the defining feature. IBM has killed the community and put alot of restrictions on the data

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#103

Post by CharlesW »

shagie wrote: post #26
nerdponx wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume there's no recourse for iOS users?

If you are using the current version of iOS, the new weather app rocks in terms of functionality (IMHO better than the previous version of Dark Sky). If you are on an old version of iOS and mourn the loss of DarkSky app, I personally like MyRadar - it has some very nice features and I used in tandem with DarkSky in the past. If you are after writing an iOS app, you already have an Apple developer account allowing for…

> If you are using the current version of iOS, the new weather app rocks in terms of functionality (IMHO better than the previous version of Dark Sky).

Tip for anyone coming from Dark Sky: Open Weather, scroll to the bottom, tap "Manage Notifications", and turn on "Next-Hour Precipitation" and "Severe Weather". For me at least, these weren't turned on by default.

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#104

Post by jeramey »

rsync wrote: post #70
jron wrote: post #5

I was really hoping https://merrysky.net/ had a graphical forecast similar to weather underground's 10 day. I've yet to find anything else that quickly shows everything you'd want to know in a single image. Even the mouseover timeline is perfection. It is so good and seemingly exclusive to WU that I sometimes wonder if they hold a patent for it.

"... similar to weather underground's 10 day ..." Came here, like I come to every weather API/tool discussion, to ask the same thing ... I would really like a less spammy, less bloated 10-day forecast a la WU. This comes close, however - there's a nice 7-day lookahead ... is it possible that WU is just fudging days 8-9-10 and no real data is available beyond 7 days ?

Persistence and linear regression are very common methods used to extend forecasts out in computationally cheap ways. Most forecast models have really awful validation statistics after about 48-60 hours out—depending on initial conditions, location, and a few other factors—so in some sense the forecast after about 3 days out isn't ever going to be very good so it's perfectly valid to use those methods. I would not be at all surprised if that's what Weather Underground does.

Another method that's occasionally used is to just fill in with TMY (Typical Meteorological Year) data. Lots of those data sets are freely available, or if not, are very inexpensive to calculate if station data is available.

If you're looking for a minimally spammy, information dense forecast and you're in the US, it's pretty hard to beat weather.gov. (And make sure to occasionally read the zone and regional forecast discussion texts, too. They're really interesting and often educational!)

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#105

Post by paxys »

NoboruWataya wrote: post #3

> Why "PirateWeather"? I've always thought that the HRRR model was pronounced the same way as the classic pirate "ARRR". Also, there is one company out there that thinks APIs can be copyrighted, which might apply here. This answers the first question I had upon seeing the name, which was, is it free, open, documented and legal ? Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably". Very commendable effort, and I hope…

> Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably".

Why do you draw that conclusion? It seemed to be making a joke about the fact that APIs are NOT copyrightable and considered fair use. The site is pretty clearly fully legal.

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#106

Post by Humphrey »

As an Australian, my main issue with almost all Weather API's and services is that the data is almost always sub-par to the weather data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). It would be great if there was a backend provider concept, so that I could tell my devices (such as an iPhone) to only use BOM data for it's inbuilt widgets.

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#107

Post by mesoman »

earthscienceman wrote: post #8

It's going to be a tangential comment but I work in science research that's adjacent to weather forecasting and I find the political/technical jockeying that is happening with forecasting to be fascinating. It's a nexus of capitalism, federal government spending, politics, and technology that has very real implications for individual Americans. In summary: horrible oversight by the federal govt (read, congress) of ou…

As one who wrote (over 10 years ago, still improving it) and sells a weather app targeted at storm chasers, weather enthusiasts and spotters... I find the NWS data to be fragmented, often based on ancient computing standards (look at how NEXRAD data is formatted - it's binary for a 16-bit computer), and very hard to find documentation on.

Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.

And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.

The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.

But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).

I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#108

Post by ace2358 »

Humphrey wrote: post #106

As an Australian, my main issue with almost all Weather API's and services is that the data is almost always sub-par to the weather data provided by the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM). It would be great if there was a backend provider concept, so that I could tell my devices (such as an iPhone) to only use BOM data for it's inbuilt widgets.

It’s truly maddening as an Aussie. How many apps just ignore the BoM? I expected the Apple one not to, but it does. It’s frustrating when friends visit me and check the weather on their phone and the data for the Google and Apple apps is so bad.

I use Willy weather that uses bom. I don’t love it though. Any recommendations? I personally can’t stand the actual BoM app as an iPhone user but I appreciate that they tried…

R.I.P Pocket Weather :(

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#109

Post by pca2 »

dzhiurgis wrote: post #12
pca2 wrote: post #7

Can confirm pirateweather.net's forecast API working as a drop-in replacement for DarkSky's. I was able to fix a soon to be broken DarkSky bitbar script by just replacing the URLs/API keys to pirateweather's in under 5 minutes.

> I was able to fix a soon to be broken DarkSky bitbar script Please fork it for us lazy ones

Pull request opened https://github.com/matryer/xbar-plugins/pull/1896

Re: Pirate Weather: A free, open, and documented forecast API

#110

Post by ehaughee »

meteo-jeff wrote: post #66
hectormalot wrote: post #2

I’ve used https://open-meteo.com/ before and I think it’s the same type of open data being exposed. These types of projects are great for stuff like home automation. I’m using to to improve my predictions for power generation (PV) and consumption (heat pump). Planning to is ergst to optimize home battery charging in the future. (Disclaimer; open sourced a small go library for open meteo, but otherwise not affiliated)

Hi, creator of open-meteo.com here! I am using a more wide range of weather models to better cover Europe, Northern Africa and Asia. North America is covered as well with GFS+HRRR and even weather models from the Canadian weather service. In contrast to pirate weather, I am using compressed local files to more easily run API nodes, without getting a huge AWS bill. Compression is especially important for large histori…

open-meteo.com looks awesome. I've been messing around writing a snow forecast app for skiing/snowboarding for a while now and the main thing I'm missing is historical snowfall data. Do these data sources exist in a machine readable format and I've just not been able to find them? If so, would you ever consider adding precip + kind of precip to your historical API?
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