

Visualising weather reports as a graph - arb99
http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=USA/CA/San_Francisco

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AndrewDucker
I really like the way that the Norwegian site yr.no does this:

[http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/California/San_Francisc...](http://www.yr.no/place/United_States/California/San_Francisco~5391959/hour_by_hour.html)

Nice and simple, without any fancy Flash/animation going on. Take a look at
the "Detailed" view to see pressure and cloud cover on the same graph.

Compare the two of them, and I find this much more readable.

~~~
bosse
Thanks! I'm a sysadmin at met.no, and will forward your comments to the devs.

I found the OP solution interesting in regards to visualizing historical
observations. As of now, we have a system seperate from yr.no for that (but I
believe it is still accessible from api.met.no).

~~~
smackay
Great work on the graphics - concise and informative.

Coverage in western Europe for wind speed and pressure on the advanced map is
limited to the North Sea, and Northeastern Atlantic. Is this due to limited
access to the data or because Scandanavians think that it is always sunny and
warm in Iberia so the weather is not worth reporting.

~~~
bosse
Our primary sector is the Northern Atlantic and the North Sea from Faroe
Islands/Iceland and up to and including the Arctic. We do those calculations
based on observations from several sources (like weather stations, weather
balloons and satellite imagery) that we feed into our meteorological and
oceanographic models. The stuff we create for our sector are in principle
always made public, and you'll see those products on yr.no and on the API.

We also retrieve and use observations and products from partner institutions
like NOAA (US) and the ECMWF (EU). Some of the partners (mostly national
services) do not accept redistribution, so some areas might unfortunately only
have basic meteorological and oceanographic data made available on our API.

It's amazing how popular yr.no has become. We got word from some South African
farmers who said they were using yr.no instead of their national service, as
our service was of better use for them. (The distance between Oslo and
Johannesburg is 6010 miles.)

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costacoast
I use this service all the time since I found out about it last year (on HN)
because it gives me more information than I will ever need and still makes it
easy to consume. The most unique aspect of this implementation is the
historical data they provide to give you an idea of weather even when there is
no forecast. This is unbelievably valuable when planning a trip to a new
region of the world and I routinely use it to plot my locations and timing
accordingly.

The only real problem I have with this site is the heavy dependence on flash,
and a few clunky UI controls when interacting with the graph over a long
period of time.

~~~
jacobn
We recently added some very simple keyboard controls: the arrow keys (left-
right: pan, up-down: zoom), that might alleviate that problem a little.

Yes, you need to click in the app once to give it focus before it registers
the keyboard clicks. Just one of the many little gotchas with flash... (don't
get me started ;)

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

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m0tive

      Loading Google Maps plugin... 
    
      If you're using HTTPS Everywhere please disable it for 
      GoogleMaps since it makes the authorization request fail. 
      Tools Menu -> Add Ons -> HTTPS Everywhere Options -> Search 
      for 'GoogleMaps' -> Click on the green check mark to turn 
      it into a red x.
    

Is this a problem with the google maps 'plugin' or their implementation?

~~~
jacobn
The authorization request that the google maps flash SDK issues to google
fails when it's issued as an https request. The HTTPS everywhere plugin
forcibly changes the request type, thereby making it fail.

AFAIK there's no way to fix it on our side.

(I'm one of the devs on weatherspark)

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Urgo
Just to throw this out there, most of this is already presented directly by
the National Weather Service:
[http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.73285&lo...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=35.73285&lon=-78.69814&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=graphical)

~~~
jacobn
... and most computer languages are turing equivalent, yet people prefer
different ones ;)

Seriously, yes, all the data is freely available in some combination of text
and graphics on the internets - the pitch here is the presentation,
aggregation and ease of exploration.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

------
dfc
Previous posts:

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2330429>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2310535>

<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3094357>

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meanderingleaf
Very cool, wish I had known about this before I built my own. Of course,
building my own let me tailor it to the data and style I wanted
(<http://dustytome.net/demos/widg/>).

As a side note: is there any place to get free(ish) weather forecasts? I've
been using Wunderground's API (which is nice), but I don't see any way to let
multiple people use it without shelling out more money than I can justify at
the moment.

~~~
jacobn
NOAA has an api (
[http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=San+Franci...](http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?CityName=San+Francisco&state=CA&site=MTR&textField1=37.775&textField2=-122.418&e=0)
click on the red XML button down right on the page)

As someone else mentioned, so does api.met.no (they power yr.no).

World Weather Online and Weather Central are commercial offerings, but
reasonably priced.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

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farico
Would be cool if you changed Europe/Vilnius shortcut to Lithuania with capital
Vilnius and not Vilniusstrasse in Austria :)

<http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=Europe/Vilnius>

suggesting to replace it with: <http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;ws=29009>

By the way I really like viewing weather as graph! Nicely done.

~~~
jacobn
Yes, yahoo's geocoding is not perfect... Searching for just "Vilnius" does the
right thing though, and takes you to:

[http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=Republic_of_Lithuania/...](http://weatherspark.com/#!dashboard;a=Republic_of_Lithuania/Vilnius)

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

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achanlon
I really wish the terms 'chart' and 'graph' were not used synonymously.

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lcm133
Very similar to the My-Cast Weather app in horizontal orientation.

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seqastian
flash? try again please.

~~~
jacobn
I hear you about flash, HTML-only "simple forecast" is in the pipeline, so do
check back.

(disclosure: I'm one of the weatherspark devs)

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forgottenpaswrd
I like it.

