Curious_Canid

“raising new questions”?

Anyone with one working synapse knows that he is doing it for political reasons and for personal spite. Probably in the opposite order.

Given the trouble he has walking, he will almost certainly put his face on it. Or did you mean, like, a picture of his face?

My guess is that the ones that are really used are proprietary, but there are probably early versions of those that originated in academia that could be used.

My experience was actually with the APIs and not with the main app. They originally allowed free access to the API for individuals, with registration, and a lot of excellent third-party apps let you enter your API to use them. When IBM purchased it, they priced the use of the APIs so that there was no option that made sense for individuals. If you weren’t using it in volume, and paying tens of thousands of dollars a year, you were just out of luck.

I hadn’t heard that IBM sold it off. I will have to go back and look at the original app. I had thought it also went through a big price jump, but that may have settled out in the meantime. It’s been a while now.

I generally agree with you. I suspect the current weather station hardware is mostly designed to report in to its corporate owners, but that could probably be worked around. Building a decentralized network for collecting weather data should be possible.

The hard part is that turning the raw data into actual forecasts requires a lot of processing power. My first thought was that it could be done by a large distributed network, similar to what was done with the SETI at Home or the protein folding project. My second thought is that there might be enough processing power that way, but it would be too slow to be useful. There’s a lot of lag time in that kind of decentralized arrangement. It would likely produce accurate forecast of what happened several hours ago. I’m not sure how to solve that part of the problem.

Strongly agree. You can dress up the interface in all kinds of ways, but if the data being presented isn’t good the rest of it doesn’t matter.

For a long time the data from Weather Underground was the gold standard. Then IBM bought them, made the data an expensive subscription, and effectively killed it for non-corporate users.

Then Dark Sky broke new ground with hyper-local weather reporting. Which was great until Apple bought them, killed the Android app, and made it exclusively available to iPhone users.

The best source of free data that is still available in the US is still the National Weather Service. Unfortunately the quality has been degraded by massive budget cuts while whole sections of the API have been taken away.

Finding a high quality data source at a reasonable price has become almost impossible.