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My primary use of the Dark Sky API is for minute-by-minute forecasts. I've yet to find another API that can answer the question "Do I have enough time to walk m

My primary use of the Dark Sky API is for minute-by-minute forecasts. I've yet to find another API that can answer the question "Do I have enough time to walk my dog before it starts raining?"

abrowne 7y ago
Same here, for the website. I actually find their forecasts beyond a few hours pretty bad¹, so I use weather.gov, but I haven't found anything as good at telling me whether it will rain in the next 20 minutes. 1: Both seemly wrong more often and more importantly unclear whether they mean a greater or lesser chance or amount of rain or snow, which makes a big difference when you are, say, biking to work.
- dstaley 7y ago
  If you're not consuming the API, AccuWeather's MinuteCast is pretty nice!
  - abrowne 7y ago
    Thanks, it does look like a good replacement.
airstrike 7y ago
AccuWeather has MinuteCast which does the same thing
SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago
My go-to for this is an app called Radar Scope [0], which is the best $10 I've ever spent on an app. Its very easy to pull it up and look at the radar products with a useful color scale (as opposed to others which make light showers look like the apocalypse). Based on the quality I assume its target market is for stormchasers and weather professionals. Its fast and has most of the radar products, including velocities. I originally bought it to answer the question "Should I shelter from this tornado?" The downside is that there is no forecasting, but thats freely available through the NWS [1]. Not affiliated, just stoked. [0] https://www.radarscope.app/ https://www.radarscope.app/ [1] https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/
- abrowne 7y ago
  With NOOA/weather.gov you can even link directly to an animated gif for radar, such as this one for Minneapolis: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/MPX_loop.gif https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/MPX_loop.gif
girzel 7y ago
This is exactly what I found it didn't work for. I live in Seattle, and basically gave up on it (with today's news, I'll uninstall it from my Android phone). I could look out the window at steady rain, and Dark Sky would still be telling me it was going to be clear all day. Like that more often than not.
- beoberha 7y ago
  I live in Seattle now but used to live in Ohio. I agree that the minute by minute is pretty much useless in Seattle but it was incredibly accurate in Ohio. I have numerous stories where I was able to get to shelter or remain sheltered minutes before a sprinkle turned into a downpour. I know nothing about weather, but I have to assume the weather patterns in Seattle are just very difficult to predict or analyze at such a fine granularity.
  - starpilot 7y ago
    The weird thing I know someone who swears by Dark Sky in Seattle, while for me it's been pretty inaccurate. I think these personal takes are plagued with confirmation bias.
- crazygringo 7y ago
  That's bizarre but actually can't be Dark Sky's fault. Switch to radar view in the app and it will show you the exact geographical distribution of rain in your city right now. This comes from national weather data. If that's inaccurate then something is wrong with the government data. Or maybe Seattle rain is somehow much patchier at a finer level than government data is able to resolve? FWIW in New York City its assessment of the next five minutes has always been literally perfect. It might say it's going to go from hard rain to nothing in two minutes... and it does, right on time. It gets increasingly noisy as you go to 15, 30, and 60 min out, though.
  - starpilot 7y ago
    Radar data is hugely noisy and it can be difficult to suss out what is cloud cover with no precipitation, or what is precipitation, plus filtering out biomass and dust. All of these show up as radar returns. There can be shadowing. Dark Sky does its own pre-processing/denoising of radar and so that can lead to different results from NOAA.

My primary use of the Dark Sky API is for minute-by-minute forecasts. I've yet to find another API that can answer the question "Do I have enough time to walk my dog before it starts raining?"

abrowne 7y ago

Same here, for the website. I actually find their forecasts beyond a few hours pretty bad¹, so I use weather.gov, but I haven't found anything as good at telling me whether it will rain in the next 20 minutes. 1: Both seemly wrong more often and more importantly unclear whether they mean a greater or lesser chance or amount of rain or snow, which makes a big difference when you are, say, biking to work.

dstaley 7y ago
If you're not consuming the API, AccuWeather's MinuteCast is pretty nice!
- abrowne 7y ago
  Thanks, it does look like a good replacement.

airstrike 7y ago

AccuWeather has MinuteCast which does the same thing

SirLuxuryYacht 7y ago

My go-to for this is an app called Radar Scope [0], which is the best $10 I've ever spent on an app. Its very easy to pull it up and look at the radar products with a useful color scale (as opposed to others which make light showers look like the apocalypse). Based on the quality I assume its target market is for stormchasers and weather professionals. Its fast and has most of the radar products, including velocities. I originally bought it to answer the question "Should I shelter from this tornado?" The downside is that there is no forecasting, but thats freely available through the NWS [1]. Not affiliated, just stoked. [0] https://www.radarscope.app/ https://www.radarscope.app/ [1] https://www.weather.gov/ https://www.weather.gov/

abrowne 7y ago
With NOOA/weather.gov you can even link directly to an animated gif for radar, such as this one for Minneapolis: https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/MPX_loop.gif https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/lite/N0R/MPX_loop.gif

girzel 7y ago

This is exactly what I found it didn't work for. I live in Seattle, and basically gave up on it (with today's news, I'll uninstall it from my Android phone). I could look out the window at steady rain, and Dark Sky would still be telling me it was going to be clear all day. Like that more often than not.

beoberha 7y ago
I live in Seattle now but used to live in Ohio. I agree that the minute by minute is pretty much useless in Seattle but it was incredibly accurate in Ohio. I have numerous stories where I was able to get to shelter or remain sheltered minutes before a sprinkle turned into a downpour. I know nothing about weather, but I have to assume the weather patterns in Seattle are just very difficult to predict or analyze at such a fine granularity.
- starpilot 7y ago
  The weird thing I know someone who swears by Dark Sky in Seattle, while for me it's been pretty inaccurate. I think these personal takes are plagued with confirmation bias.
crazygringo 7y ago
That's bizarre but actually can't be Dark Sky's fault. Switch to radar view in the app and it will show you the exact geographical distribution of rain in your city right now. This comes from national weather data. If that's inaccurate then something is wrong with the government data. Or maybe Seattle rain is somehow much patchier at a finer level than government data is able to resolve? FWIW in New York City its assessment of the next five minutes has always been literally perfect. It might say it's going to go from hard rain to nothing in two minutes... and it does, right on time. It gets increasingly noisy as you go to 15, 30, and 60 min out, though.
- starpilot 7y ago
  Radar data is hugely noisy and it can be difficult to suss out what is cloud cover with no precipitation, or what is precipitation, plus filtering out biomass and dust. All of these show up as radar returns. There can be shadowing. Dark Sky does its own pre-processing/denoising of radar and so that can lead to different results from NOAA.