Drop #164 (2022-12-23): Twelve Days of [Quick] Drops • Day 12

The Weather [Data Sources|Outside] [Is/Are] Frightful

On The Twelfth (& Last!) Day Of Quick Drops 🎅🏽hrbrmstr🎅🏽 Gave To Me…

🎶 Alternative Weather Sources 🎶

(If this is your first Xmas Quick Drop, head back to Day 01 to find out what's going on.)

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On this last day of quick drops (and the last one until after Christmas), the weather outside in the ConUS is quite frightful. Even the Maine compound is without power, along with much of New England. To add insult to weather injury, the Dark Sky API shuts down soon (“thanks”, Apple). As such, I felt compelled to drop some alternate weather sites/apps/kits/resources that I use throughout the week (being a very amateur weather nerd).

• [APPS] Carrot Weather: hands-down the most irreverent weather app that lets you choose from multiple data sources.

• [DATA] F5 Weather: Worth the price of admission to get detailed forecasts from multiple sources (it has some free options as well). I have code to parse the forecast tables if folks are interested.

• [KITS] WeatherFlow Tempest: I've owned almost every white-box and home-pro kit out there (been doing this for many years). Now I have a Davis system (with an air-quality sensor added on) plus the Tempest for keeping track of local conditions. I was wary about the Tempest at the start, but it's great, as are the folks that built it and provide support for it. There's a bunch of code in my GH repo for working with the local UDP broadcast data.

• [DATA] OpenWeather One Call API offers a decent free tier, and helpful onboarding from DarkSky's API

• [DATA] NOAA HRRR: real-time 3-km resolution, hourly updated, cloud-resolving, convection-allowing atmospheric model, initialized by 3km grids with 3km radar assimilation. Radar data is assimilated in the HRRR every 15 min over a 1-h period adding further detail to that provided by the hourly data assimilation from the 13km radar-enhanced Rapid Refresh. (Archive)

• [APPS] Pivotal: I've been an F5 user for a while, but Pivotal makes data access much easier and have API access sales fairly regularly. The free site is 100% useful, but if you really want to switch from DarkSky's API, this is one I'd heartily recommend.

• [DATA] Apple WeatherKit: this is the official DarkSky fallback from Apple. Hit up my GH for code examples. It is one of the worst REST API experiences you'll encounter, though.

• [APPS] WeatherNerds is great if you want models and maps, but don't require direct access to data.

• [APPS] Windy: pretty weather in a novel interface.

• [APPS] wttr.in: I was reminded by @jmcastagnetto@mastodon.social about this outstanding CLI weather client (I take it for granted folks know about that, something which I should not do).

FIN

A final advent calendar drop, this time one created with GPT-3, DALL-E, and Midjourney: AI Advent Calendar 2022.

I hope everyone gets some downtime and has a chance to [re]connect with friends and fam. ☮