I understand that weather on TV can’t be hyperlocally accurate. But a weather app on my phone has my exact GPS coordinates. Why can’t it tell me exactly when a rain cloud will be passing over my location?
It’s gotten to the point where I just use precipitation maps to figure out my rain chances for the day.
The hourly forecast is mostly useless because it’s not a chance % but a % of the area that will be raining.
Darksky could do it back in the day more or less. you’d get messages that it would rain in about 15 minutes and stop in the next 30.
Thing is, precep maps don’t work everywhere. You’re probably in a location like me where a thick front rolling through will almost always bring rain. If you get into warmer tropical climates, rainclouds will just poof out of nowhere and drop rain on your ass while other crazy fronts will pass over with nothing but some dark clouds.
Apple bought darksky, and Apple Weather now has that feature that notifies you before it rains.
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yeah, i don’t run apple so they don’t exist for me anymore.
That sucks. It is so frustrating when large companies shut down widely used public APIs.
I can’t really describe to you how angry I was when that shit went through. Like… I knew it was ridiculous to get so angry but, I LOVED THAT FREAKING APP.
OMG I had no idea. Ouch.
Oh, yeah. Not only did they take it away from all Android users, they also killed the API that let other apps access it. I wrote an open-source tool that made Dark Sky data available to Wear OS watch faces. It worked beautifully for several years, until Apple killed it.
The worst of it is that was my second attempt. An earlier version of the same tool worked with Weather Underground data. Then IBM bought it, changed the API completely, and priced it so that only business could afford it.
I haven’t had the heart to try a third time.
Sorry, every once in a while I’m overcome with the need to whine about it.
Just putting it out there, but the National Weather Service has a free API here.
I appreciate the suggestion. I have thought about it, but part of what I wanted, like the original poster, was more localized information. NWS is great for overall data, but it doesn’t get down to precise locations.
LOL. Thanks for your service. I think you should let yourself off with time served ;-)
I appreciate that. :-D
Does most weather data in the US ultimately come from weather.gov? No idea about API but maybe it can be scraped from the web.
NWS is a great resource, but there are a startling number of other organizations that collect weather data.
😉