> Our API service for existing customers is not changing today, but we will no longer accept new signups. The API will continue to function through the end of 2021.
And yet another functional API shut down and privatized. This is the way of the web now, a few companies owning the data, and nothing cool left to mess around with.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this trend happening for years. You used to be able to scroll to the footer of practically any service and find an API link. No more.
Et al - maybe, but Dark Sky built their own near-future "hyperlocal" forecasting engine and they were the first ones to do that. They basically invented the whole genre.
Perhaps they expanded into repackaging NOAA data now, but that's not what Dark Sky is about.
IIRC they built the models with user data, but stopped collecting from phones because so many different sensors are used for rH and temp in phones plus being in pockets, battery temp, etc meant the data had too much variance. Even though I hate that they did this bc it's my favourite weather app, it actually would make sense to just use iphones if they were going to start collecting that data again since all the hardware is the same.
The barometer data that comes from phones (both Android and iOS) is extremely resilient and there is a lot of value to be derived from it. Ongoing research by Cliff Mass and team (at UW) shows that machine learning can help bias-correct and error-correct barometric pressure data on the fly with very good results. That data can also be assimilated into WRF to make forecasts with higher accuracy.
They used an ML/statistical approach to forecasting, rather than physical modeling. They had some secret sauce in doing fast ML on phones, before libraries like CoreML existed.
As someone that's tried using the weather.gov API, let me just say it's atrociously bad. I'm sure the data is accurate and all, but the API is actively hostile towards developers.
It's designed that way. AccuWeather and other weather companies actively lobby to make sure that people continue using them, and not the free government sources of weather data.
That endpoint groups hour-by-hour forecasts (see below) together to deduplicate data, but it makes it very painful to parse. For instance, "2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00/PT4H" means that value is valid for 4 hours beginning at 2020-03-31T15:00:00+00:00. The durations varied from time interval to time interval and it made it super annoying to parse through.
You've basically described all commercial weather apps. Dark Sky (and some others) do incorporate other local sources of info, but free govt data covers much/most of what they use.
Dark Sky claimed to do significant weather data collection themselves, via barometers in phones. I don't know if that data was ever used or available in their API, but definitely, the data Dark Sky had was all not public data.
And yet another functional API shut down and privatized. This is the way of the web now, a few companies owning the data, and nothing cool left to mess around with.
I can't be the only one who has noticed this trend happening for years. You used to be able to scroll to the footer of practically any service and find an API link. No more.