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

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)

This is great. Can endorse LuckGrib for IoS folks as well. Great UI and can pull NOAA and EU models. https://luckgrib.com/. Not FOSS but worth the $20 I paid once several years ago. Popular among wind sports enthusiasts many of who are hobbyist meteorologists.

I really like this free Forecase API too https://developer.yr.no/

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 our technical/scientific forecasting resources means that our forecasting ability is extremely fragmented and poorly organized. This has lead to a lot of companies being essentially resellers of public data. These companies claim to create a lot of value added products ('cleaner APIs', 'minutecasts', etc etc) that are either scientifically dubious or technically simple and then these companies walk away with huge profits based on being a portal to government data.

It's so American it is almost laughable, all while the European ECMWF eats our lunch in terms of accuracy even for the CONUS. I've discussed this on technical internet forums often enough that I can practically already write the replies to my own comment. "What's the problem with that?" etc et al. But the reality of it is that it's emblematic of how politically broken the US is, in particular with regards to the agencies in charge of scientific products and funding. Not to mention the concrete problems with the forecast products themselves.

Anyway. Good luck pirate weather and godspeed. Information was meant to be free and open, especially the forecast. It's such a laughably simple problem that could/should be so easily solved but, alas, there is money to be made!

A thousand times this!