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.
> 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.<p>This answers the first question I had upon seeing the name, which was, is it free, open, documented <i>and legal</i>? Based on the above the answer seems to be "probably".<p>Very commendable effort, and I hope the project can last. It seems to be very difficult to maintain a free and reliable weather API so hopefully the dev is not biting off more than he can chew.
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.
I was really hoping <a href="https://merrysky.net/" rel="nofollow">https://merrysky.net/</a> 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.
I found this old blog article at a high level on how Dark Sky works... about 12 years old now. I always loved this app and was kind of sad when Apple acquired them... but to have Apple come in and just buy your app out is probably a great feeling for the founders :)<p>Anyhow, here's the url:<p><a href="https://jackadam.github.io/2011/how-dark-sky-works" rel="nofollow">https://jackadam.github.io/2011/how-dark-sky-works</a>
How does this differ from NOAA weather.gov api?<p><a href="https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api" rel="nofollow">https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api</a><p>Or is this a friendlier overlay of their interface?
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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!
If you asked me 25 years ago, "Wanna bet hackers will be excited about a weather API in the future?" ... Sink me ... I would have lost that bet.
I’ve used <a href="https://open-meteo.com/" rel="nofollow">https://open-meteo.com/</a> before and I think it’s the same type of open data being exposed.<p>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.<p>(Disclaimer; open sourced a small go library for open meteo, but otherwise not affiliated)
I usually use forecase.weather.gov They provide a nice textual weather page, with English, for next 7 or 8 days [1]. But it is tiring to open 3 or 4 bookmarks, so I thought to consume that as json & make a single page html app with ajax requests. Its still in progress, I spent few minutes yesterday. The surprising thing was (I was ready to fetch the html text & parse it, difficult), I simply changed one parameter to JSON & I got json [2]. I didn't find any easy to find documentation about json endpoint. My plan is to have city abbreviations on top in horizontal menu, then each click fetches json, puts it into div below.<p>1. <a href="https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.78&lon=-122.42&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=text&TextType=2" rel="nofollow">https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.78&lon=-122...</a><p>2. <a href="https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.98&lon=-120.38&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=json" rel="nofollow">https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.98&lon=-120...</a>
Related discussion about Merry Sky, a Dark Sky replacement built on this<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191" rel="nofollow">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34155191</a>
Is there a linguistic shift happening here where this is no longer "a service implementing the same API as Dark Sky", rather it is "an API"
This is great. Can endorse LuckGrib for IoS folks as well. Great UI and can pull NOAA and EU models. <a href="https://luckgrib.com/" rel="nofollow">https://luckgrib.com/</a>. Not FOSS but worth the $20 I paid once several years ago. Popular among wind sports enthusiasts many of who are hobbyist meteorologists.
Awesome, but it's not yet got the text summary feature, which curiously is also missing from Apple's official Dark Sky replacement, WeatherKit:<p><a href="https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi" rel="nofollow">https://developer.apple.com/documentation/weatherkitrestapi</a><p>I created the start of a Python wrapper for WeatherKit, if anyone is interested in helping with that effort:<p><a href="https://github.com/davecom/PyWeatherKit">https://github.com/davecom/PyWeatherKit</a>
One of Dark Sky's features was integrating hyperlocal weather stations.<p>Right now there are thousands of weather stations posting regular reports via APRS.<p>Any chance to see those integrated?
Tried it indirectly via MerrySky after it was mentioned here the other day.<p>I am in Europe it was completely off in both its 24-hour forecast and the actual real-time weather. It indicated a continuous heavy snowfall whereby in reality the sky was just lightly clouded with no precipitation. Just 2c.
I applaud the effort. I just checked the forecast data for Berlin, Germany and it is quite inaccurate compared to the quality models offered for my region.<p>It seems that they only use NOAA data even though there are vastly superior models for the EU, e.g. ICON-EU and ECMWF.
Is there a decent free weather app for Android or iOS which doesn't have ads and / or unnecessary tracking?<p>Would be cool if Pirate Weather could serve as the foundation for such a thing.
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.