OpenWeatherMap

by aaronbrethorst • 13 years ago

116 44 13 years ago

jpatokal2• 13 years ago

This looks epic, but is awfully scant on details: eg. where the worldwide precipitation data coming from, and how current is it?

zalew2• 13 years ago

It's written on the frontpage "Weather data is recieved from global meterological broadcast services and more than 40 000 weather stations." http://openweathermap.org/sys

dfc9• 13 years ago

I came here to ask the same question and I saw the 40k number you mention and I visited the page you link to. The occassional blinking light on a google map does not really answer the question of how they accumulated data from 40,000 weather stations.

I got the following error when I tried the layer station link[1]:

  ×Ошибка 404 (depricated function, see more http://openweathermap.org/wiki/API/JSON_API)

Ошибка is russian for error/mistake.

[1] http://openweathermap.org/layer-station

brudgers2• 13 years ago

In the US, National Weather Service is free and ad free and has a staff of top notch meteorologists.

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.267153&lon=-...

I am a huge fan the hourly weather graph:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.26715&lon=-9...

Also available in tabular format for your parsing pleasure:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=30.26715&lon=-9...

thejosh• 13 years ago

In Australia we have BOM (bureau of meteorology) which most of the localised weather apps pull in from due to Accuracy.

For example in my City there is this table [1] which has all the suburbs listed with their current status + recorded time

The iOS apps published by third parties seem to do quite well, so they cover the cost of the data [2] which is probably provided in CSV format..

[1] http://www.bom.gov.au/wa/observations/perth.shtml [2] http://www.bom.gov.au/other/charges.shtml

Aloisius• 13 years ago

The National Weather Service is something we did really well. We give away free national weather data, ocean monitoring data, air monitoring data, doppler radar, plus predictions for everything from floods to hurricanes. Their weather stations are everything from thousands of fixed stations to over a hundred weather balloons they fly daily to supplementary data from ships that have weather stations on board.

It really is an impressive variety of data.

dfc9• 13 years ago

Don't forget to mention Dial-A-Buoy.[1] There is also a neat whale+buoy project at NOAA but I forget the name.

NOAA and NIST are something we do very well.

[1] http://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/dial.shtml

minikomi• 13 years ago

Just throwing my local in the mix:

Japan Meteorological Agency http://www.jma.go.jp/en/jikei/319.html

homeomorphic2• 13 years ago

Interestingly, national meteorological services seem to be among the few public institution that do "free data for the public good" right in general. Well done! I'm throwing in the Norwegian Meteorological Institute's Yr.no [1] ("yr" meaning drizzle or lively/excited/giddy).

Global data is available [2], as is data from measuring stations in Norway [3]. Apparently the service is so popular that printouts of today's weather (in Norwegian) have been found hanging in hotels in other European countries.

[1] http://www.yr.no/

[2] http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

[3] http://om.yr.no/verdata/klimadata/ (Norwegian only)

dfc9• 13 years ago

Dont forget the national time laboratories. Out of curiosity do you know if Justervesenet, Norwegian Metrology and Accreditation Service falls under the same organization structure as the NWI?

kybernetyk2• 13 years ago

I really envy you guys. I'm somewhat of a weather enthusiast and here in Germany the (tax funded) Wetterdienst [0] makes only out-of-date low resolution weather data freely available.

There are better systems like webKonrad [1] (live radar data down to city level, etc) available but as a common citizen you can't even get paid access. Access is reserved to the fire department, etc.

Funnily though there was a little f*ck up in the webKonrad app and they had hard coded credentials to a developer test account in the app. With a little reverse engineering we had free access to this pretty cool tool for a few months.

IMHO it's pretty sad that they fund the whole German Wetterdienst operation with taxes and citizens have no access to the full data.

[0] http://www.dwd.de

[1] http://webkonrad.dwd.de

rorrr2• 13 years ago

Have you considered suing for access?

homeomorphic2• 13 years ago

Anecdotally, Yr.no's data [1] is good for most of northern Europe. The Norwegian Meteorological Institute's simulation domain [2] seems to cover most of Germany.

[1] http://om.yr.no/verdata/free-weather-data/

[2] http://www.yr.no/kart/#lat=67.73265&lon=5.44686&zoom=3&laga=...

brudgers2• 13 years ago

"I really envy you guys."

A trip to the doctor will cure you of that.

ddeck2• 13 years ago

The weather service here in Hong Kong offers an amazing array of data from ambient gamma radiation levels in various locations by the hour:

http://www.weather.gov.hk/radiation/rmn_hourly_e.htm

to real-time lightning stike mapping:

http://www.weather.gov.hk/wxinfo/llis/gm_index.htm

Despite the horrendous design, the functionality is quite impressive. They even host a separate site for senior citizens complete with super-sized fonts, simpler data presentation, and a magnifying glass.

http://elderly.weather.gov.hk/socare.htm

DigitalSea2• 13 years ago

In Australia access to a free weather API is scarce. I've had to resort to writing scraping scripts in the past, hopefully OpenWeatherMap means I don't have to scrape sites any more and have access to a nice free API.

jpatokal2• 13 years ago

http://www.bom.gov.au/catalogue/data-feeds.shtml ?

DigitalSea2• 13 years ago

I didn't actually know this existed, but even looking at this page yields a dissatisfying result. The feeds look like they don't provide nearly as much information and the confusing and archaic feed formats as well. What is wrong with a straight up JSON api?

wensing• 13 years ago

This is excellent. Hi from Stormpulse; welcome to the weather fold.

dfc9• 13 years ago

Like another commenter I am curious about where the data comes from. The occasional blinking dot on a map does not provide a lot of information about how they amassed the data from 40,000 weather stations. When I did not see a lot of details it occurred to me that they might be acting as a middleman for Weather underground's API. However Weather Underground claims to have the most weather stations and they list a lower bound of 25,000 weather stations.[1]

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/about.asp

est• 13 years ago

They use public airport weather data

dfc9• 13 years ago

Who is "they"? I am assuming you mean openweather. Given that the page linked above details the use of personal weather stations you certainly cannot be referring to WeatherUnderground. Where did you find the source of the data for openweather?

Addendum: See my comment below. The number of airports and airfields visible from the air does not get you over 45k.

pellias• 13 years ago

Yup, when i zoomed in to see the station information, all of them are airports.

miahi• 13 years ago

Looks like they are using airport data (identified by ICAO ID) and ham radio data (probably via APRS, identified by callsigns), like this one: KA0RUX http://openweathermap.org/station/10400 http://www.findu.com/cgi-bin/wxpage.cgi?call=KA0RUX

There is also an API to feed new data if you have a weather station: http://openweathermap.org/stations

corford2• 13 years ago

I don't know much about this stuff but I love the idea of contributing data.

Can anyone with a bit more clue tell me if something along the lines of a DVB-T Stick (great for contributing local ADS-B data to fr24.com) exists in the meterological world?

Basically a cheap (< €150) setup that would let me capture some simple data (temp, windspeed, humidity) and get it into a raspi (or similar)?

dfc9• 13 years ago

Check out the list of personal weather station vendors at weather underground[1]. I am not sure about the price but I think I would have remembered if the prices were over your budget.

[1] http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/setup.asp#hardwar...

corford2• 13 years ago

Thanks!

ancarda• 13 years ago

There doesn't seem to be any indication of usage limits on the API or a pricing structure (i.e free is 500 hits/hr). Free APIs are cool but expensive to run. Where is the money coming from to fund this service?

taternuts• 13 years ago

I'm signed up in the hopes that I'll get grandfathered into better rates when you scale

positr0n• 13 years ago

Neat service. I have a typo to report: If you try to create an account that already exists, it says "name alredy exist."

wyclif2• 13 years ago

I also noticed that it seems the text on the site was not written by a native English-speaker. Editing is needed.

paul_f• 13 years ago

That seems a better way to spell that word anyway. Let's start a campaign to eliminate unpronounced characters from the English language. Who's with me?!

thezach• 13 years ago

looks kinda cool... I do a lot of weather scraping ( http://warningweather.com ) and have actually just secured a direct connection to AWIPS (the national weather service's computer system).

I really love the idea of you service and will sign up for it tomorrow for some future projects. My biggest concern is your data being contaminated by home weather stations.... those stations tend to be pretty wack and can just really mess up your data set.

dfc9• 13 years ago

What does securing a direct connection to AWIPS entail? Sounds neat.

tunnuz• 13 years ago

This is amazing, I've been waiting for this.

wyclif2• 13 years ago

I suspect the landing page text was not written by a native English-speaker. I'd suggest an edit and giving it a professional once-over.

ddeck2• 13 years ago

The popular weather aggregating websites generally do a poor job outside of the US. Presumably because they rely on a global weather data source rather than the country-specific agencies.

When travelling, I typically reference the World Meteorological Organization's site to find the official forecasts:

http://worldweather.wmo.int/

They list official observations, forecasts, and climate data for ~1700 cities worldwide in numerous languages and provide the link to the respective official local national weather service for each country.

And if you live in a typhoon/hurricane susceptible region as I do, their severe weather website aggregates official tracking estimates and forecasts from a multitude of weather services:

http://severe.worldweather.org/

fs111• 13 years ago

I played with this a few weeks ago and made a little python thingy, that prints the weather based on geoip: https://github.com/fs111/geoip-weather

pletisan• 13 years ago

password field is clean ?

OpenWeatherMap

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