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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

#131

Post by alexander0042 »

vorpalhex wrote: post #82

One of Dark Sky's features was integrating hyperlocal weather stations. Right now there are thousands of weather stations posting regular reports via APRS. Any chance to see those integrated?

They (sort of) are! It gets into the nuance of the weather model side of things, which I don't know as much about, but the HRRR/ GFS models ingest data from APRS and incorporate that into their forecasts. This means that these observations are included (especially in the US), but are at about a 2 hour lag compared to direct readings

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

#132

Post by fsociety999 »

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…

> the new weather app rocks in terms of functionality (IMHO better than the previous version of Dark Sky)

While I agree that functionally it offers a lot, the interface is around 1000 times worse than the Dark Sky app. For example, to see the “feels like” temperature over the next few hours in Dark Sky, it used to show up immediately on load for the current time, and with a single tap to see it over the next 24 hours. On the new Apple Weather app, you have to first tap on the current day, then tap on the drop down on the upper right, then tap on “Feels Like”, then tap on the graph itself and drag to the desired time.

It is absolutely incredible to me that something so simple went from taking one step to taking five steps. I don’t know how any user interface designer can justify it.

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

#133

Post by alexander0042 »

wendyshu wrote: post #21

https://pirateweather.net/apis isn't loading for me

This is a limitation of how the Developer Portal is set up, you have to be registered to view the APIs. Like the other poster said, if you're looking for general info, go to the docs section, since all the information is there

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

#134

Post by alexander0042 »

waynecochran wrote: post #46

I like having an open API. Every weather site eventually becomes trash as it is loaded with obnoxious ads. Maybe the answer it just to have numerous weather front ends.

It's a real issue, that's why I made my own! The beauty of an open source one is that if things start to go off the rails, someone else could also pick up and recreate the data source

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

#135

Post by alexander0042 »

jacurtis wrote: post #60
ushakov wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hello > This diagram is actually pretty simple The diagram looks like an ad > All it uses are Lambdas (serverless functions), S3 buckets (object storage), and SNS (broadcast/push queues) Do you actually need all of this or do you use it because Amazon tells you to? I know for instance you cannot use Amazon SES without also using S3 and Lambda > So if the builder of this wanted to move to GCP or Azure, they are not re…

Wow, I struck a nerve. I'm happy to address these points however. > The diagram looks like an ad Lol, Its an architecture diagram. You could swap the AWS-specific icons for generic ones I suppose, and it wouldn't change anything. It is fulfilling its purpose of explaining how all the services connect together to deliver the product. Just because it is an AWS Lambda icon doesn't mean you couldn't make it an Azure Func…

You clearly know way more about cloud implementations than I do, so I really appreciate the time you took to explain that out! Since I am the dev here though, the one things I can confirm is that you're 100% correct about the setup methodology- almost every decision was based on "how can I do this in a way that's cost effective". In particular, the underlying data was already on AWS, so it just made sense to build it there.

I think one thing that gets lost in discussion is the advantages of serverless approaches for people without a ton of technical background. I built 90% of this without knowing anything about servers or APIs, but the cloud tools (from whoever) let me ignore all of that and just write a bunch of Python scripts that do cool things. I know it ends up sounding a bit like an AWS ad (I wish I was sponsored by them, but am not), but there really are perks to the approach

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

#136

Post by alexander0042 »

aequitas wrote: post #40
ushakov wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would go to cloud providers, which can offer me managed rabbitmq, kafka or mongodb Certainly, I wouldn't get any vendor-specific services like Lambda or SNS (in this example)

The Lambda functions will just be running your business logic code. Only specific part Lambda provides is the glue. Which is easy to replace with any other cloud or self hosted alternative.

The the end of the day, the real reason I went with Lambda to build this is that when I started, I didn't know anything about spinning up a server, building a storage array, or serving an web request. But what I did know was how to write a Python script to extract weather data from a file. The really cool thing about some of these cloud tools is that they let me ignore all of those (very difficult) problems and just focus on the data

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

#137

Post by zinekeller »

markdown wrote: post #125
jamesbfb wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they've made it even more difficult over the past few years. I had written a script that would scrape BoM's page and send the up-to-date conditions via MQTT but it stopped working a few years ago. IRIC, even changing the HTTP headers/user-agent prevented it from ever working again. That said, I understand it's absolutely their prerogative and they have a right to make money from the data.

> they have a right to make money from the data. I thought it was a govt service. BOM is private?

You'll be surprised that the free-for-all-no-questions-asked US system is not the one followed around the world. Australia, like other countries with significant British history, has the concept of Crown Copyrights (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Australia). Whether it's the (UK) Met Office (https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/met-office-data-f...), (Australian) BoM (https://reg.bom.gov.au/business-solutions/) or (NZ) MetService (https://metraweather.com/), commercial use is paid-for. Personal use is implied to be free, but usually they interpret using their API to be commercial use.

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

#138

Post by thejosh »

zinekeller wrote: post #137
markdown wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> they have a right to make money from the data. I thought it was a govt service. BOM is private?

You'll be surprised that the free-for-all-no-questions-asked US system is not the one followed around the world. Australia, like other countries with significant British history, has the concept of Crown Copyrights ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Australia ). Whether it's the (UK) Met Office ( https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/met-office-data-f... ), (Australian) BoM ( https://reg.bom.gov.au/…

That being said, and I agree with all points you raised, the Australian Gov has been fantastic over the last few years of focusing on open data, to give credit where it's due.

https://data.gov.au/search

Their datasets are great!

G-NAF for example: https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-19432f89-dc3a-4ef3-b943-5...

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

#139

Post by zinekeller »

thejosh wrote: post #138
zinekeller wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You'll be surprised that the free-for-all-no-questions-asked US system is not the one followed around the world. Australia, like other countries with significant British history, has the concept of Crown Copyrights ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crown_copyright#Australia ). Whether it's the (UK) Met Office ( https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/services/data/met-office-data-f... ), (Australian) BoM ( https://reg.bom.gov.au/…

That being said, and I agree with all points you raised, the Australian Gov has been fantastic over the last few years of focusing on open data, to give credit where it's due. https://data.gov.au/search Their datasets are great! G-NAF for example: https://data.gov.au/dataset/ds-dga-19432f89-dc3a-4ef3-b943-5...

To be fair, from looking at the available datasets of different countries, it seems that weather data tends to be the one requiring business-level licensing. There are exceptions like Norway's Met (https://api.met.no/) and US' NOAA (too many to list), but unfortunately the usual answer for "weather data?" is "pay first".

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

#140

Post by QuinnyPig »

alexander0042 wrote: post #56
ushakov wrote: post #15

The tech diagram on AWS is insane. This is what I call vendor lock-in porn I'm wondering how much your monthly bill is?

This is like the 5th iteration of that darn diagram, and I still can't quite get it right. The other comments are correct, the underlying setup isn't that complicated, and it wouldn't be too tricky to build it for another cloud, since all that's really happening is a Python script reading a NetCDF file. The real perk to building everything using a server-less approach was that everything scaled down to 1 user (me), a…

Want me to take a gander at it? This is a project I’d love to see thrive.
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