5 ms·

Norwegian Meteorological Institute has an excellent free weather API

169 points by notpushkin 4y ago

deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
miffe 4y ago
Wendover did a nice video of how this data is collected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U
- bluenose69 4y ago
  At about https://youtu.be/V0Xx0E8cs7U?t=36 https://youtu.be/V0Xx0E8cs7U?t=36 in that video, an equivalence is made between "one hundred thousand feet" and "three hundred thousand meters". I replayed it a few times to check.
  - WelcomeShorty 4y ago
    Interestingly only the spoken text makes that mistake, the subtitles are correctly stating 30.000 meters.
inciampati 4y ago
And they also have a wonderful mobile weather app, also called "yr"!
- Nanite 4y ago
  Which, at least for the Oslo area, offers more reliable predictions than Apple's weather app (which is always weather.com, afaik) Having said that, and having the Norwegian Meteorological Institute down the road from where I live, their local predictions are often completely off on rain, to the point I always bring a raincoat when going out.
  - semi-extrinsic 4y ago
    For local rainfall predictions, the best solution is to look at the weather radar service they have.
  - kebman 4y ago
    I prefer the weather radar for that. Actual clouds and the live direction they're going in is a great predictor of rain. In fact I'd love to improve lightning detection by making a script that also takes into account wind direction, since lightning tends to travel with clouds. It could be as easy as using an ellipsis directed as a kind of weather vane, perhaps stretching out with wind speed. Currently I use a simple circular distance calculation to detect proximity.
- hggh 4y ago
  Beware, the Android version forces you to activate Google Play Services
- tomduncalf 4y ago
  Came here to say this, I love the app, it has the nicest UI of all the weather apps I’ve tried and seems fairly accurate. I was tipped off about it by friends in a ski resort who say it’s the most accurate for them in terms of predicting snowfall, bluebird days etc. Unfortunately it doesn’t give “next hour” precipitation info for the UK though so I use AccuWeather for this… but find Yr much clearer for longer range weather.
ducktective 4y ago
I wonder how does it compare to "wttr.in". They apparently use WorldWeatherOnline for source. Also heads up, the NMI provides a nifty dashboard available as pdf and svg: https://developer.yr.no/doc/guides/deprecating-old-widgets/ https://developer.yr.no/doc/guides/deprecating-old-widgets/
- INTPenis 4y ago
  From my perspective as a Swede I've never been satisfied with any international weather API. I've completely lost faith in them. For years now I've only used the official Swedish meteorological institute (SMHI) app. It used to suck so bad that a lot of Swedes used the Yr app or the Danish DMI app. But it's been vastly improved.
  - fruit2020 4y ago
    Kind of the same in the Netherlands. There’s a website buienradar.nl where you can see the clouds movement and you can see in advance when it’s going to rain on you, which for me is the most relevant weather fact.
  - kebman 4y ago
    As far as I know there's a lot of cooperation between the Nordic weather institutes to make their predictions work better. Certainly one example are the weather radars which seem to be standardized and connected in the Nordics.
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]
shp0ngle 4y ago
The last time I looked at it, they wanted to artificially limit the number of people using it, by doing all the developer documentation just in Norwegian. I see that’s no longer the case and all docs are in English. edit: I guess my memory is wrong, because all the archive.org API docs websites are in English.
- ducktective 4y ago
  [edited out due to further explanations]
  - shp0ngle 4y ago
    I don’t understand what you mean. Maybe my memory is wrong, it was a long time ago. But I really remember they even wrote explicitly it’s to limit people from using it, or something similar. If I had time now I would look into web archive to check if my memory is not deceiving me
- mytailorisrich 4y ago
  You should take it as a nice bonus if they publish their docs in English rather than as a given, especially when it's free and from a country where English is not the language.
  - Broken_Hippo 4y ago
    I'm still a bit surprised these weren't available in English. It isn't the language of the country, but children start learning it at age 6. A lot of masters and PhD courses are taught in English, and some workplaces use it quite a bit, especially if they do collaborations with other countries. This would fall in that last category. I can find a lot of information from the government in English, and all of my immigration paperwork was in English - they don't require you to further translate into Norwegian. I can mostly get by using English, but Norwegian is needed to integrate and it makes a social life easier. norwegian is necessary for most jobs, though. Edit: To illustrate it even more: Graffiti is in english half of the time and Norwenglish exists.
politelemon 4y ago
The eink dashboard project I'm using[1] has an option to get weather from Metno, what I like about their API is that the only "API key" required is passing a contact email address in the user agent so they can notify you of any problems, abuse, or breaking changes etc.[2] so to me it feels like an honour system. Of course only time will tell whether this generosity is abused and they have to lock it down. 1: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display 2:https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/ https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/
solardev 4y ago
Where do they get their data from? Do the various national weather agencies share data with each other?
- input_sh 4y ago
  > Do the various national weather agencies share data with each other? Yes, via a UN body called World Meteorological Organization. They have 193 members, only missing a dozen or so island nations.
  - solardev 4y ago
    Does that mean all weather apps have the same source data?
    - cube00 4y ago
      I can't imagine even the likes of Apple with their WeatherKit want to have to deal with installing and maintaining their own physical meteorological sensors in every country.
      - solardev 4y ago
        I don't know about installation of physical devices, but it'd be cool to see Big Tech teaming up with the weather folks for developing mesh protocols, analytical techniques, data optimizations, etc. Or maybe that's all done already? I dunno. Kinda like how IBM owns the Weather Channel.
    - chrismeller 4y ago
      Very much no. A lot of them are, somewhat sadly but predictably, targeted at larger markets and therefore pull data from NOAA for the US, the UK Met, and the German weather service (DWD), etc. but then fill in the gaps with something like NOAA that will provide predictions for everywhere in the world. You also quickly get into different models that are used by different services, usually because they work better in the specific environment they're targeting. For instance, Estonia and Finland, possibly with some others, collaborate on their own weather model that works pretty well in the Baltics. There are also highly-regarded models like the ones provided by ECMWF that are only available for a fee, so a lot of apps won't include them, instead preferring to simply use NOAA because it's free for everywhere.
bcraven 4y ago
In Home Assistant the default 'met' platform uses Met.no. According to the docs it "was introduced in Home Assistant 0.79, and it's used by 67.9% of the active installations." https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/met/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/met/
- gingerlime 4y ago
  works great but has a couple of limitations compared to darksky. For example I couldn’t find a badge showing percipitation probability or even humidity (there’s one badge for everything?). The hourly forecast is disabled by default for some reason. luckily easy to enable once you know about it.
- moontear 4y ago
  I‘m not sure how this is relevant to the post, but just mentioning that the 67,9% just indicates that this much installations are using this integration (met). Since this is the default weather provider in HA and everybody wants weather the high percentage makes sense.
kebman 4y ago
They have a lot of cool stuff. For instance I made this small script to instantly detect nearby lightning strikes without having to look at their map.[1] I use it to alert me when I need to turn off sensitive equipment. Caveat: It only works in the Nordics. Or, well, it'll probably work outside the Nordics as well, but it's kinda pointless if you don't live there lol. 1: https://gist.github.com/kebman/0d624a9d22c754658b6eee53eab951b2 https://gist.github.com/kebman/0d624a9d22c754658b6eee53eab95...
semi-extrinsic 4y ago
In addition to stuff like running this open API, they also provide free and openly available weather modelling and forecast for southern Africa. To me this feels like one of the best examples of how to provide aid for developing countries, by giving them information that enables everyone from fishers and farmers to governments to make better decisions.
- sgiratch 4y ago
  Actually 2 / 3 of all users for Yr are from outside Norway https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/nordland/yr.no-populaer-over-hele-verden-fordi-det-er-en-gratis-vaertjeneste.-hedres-av-unicef-og-norad.-1.15645054?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/nordland/yr.no-populaer-ov...
timonoko 4y ago
Annoying part is that tide & current prediction comes from Kartverket.no and those two Government Offices cannot combine information. Issues are very much related.

169 points by notpushkin 4y ago

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

Wendover did a nice video of how this data is collected. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V0Xx0E8cs7U

bluenose69 4y ago
At about https://youtu.be/V0Xx0E8cs7U?t=36 https://youtu.be/V0Xx0E8cs7U?t=36 in that video, an equivalence is made between "one hundred thousand feet" and "three hundred thousand meters". I replayed it a few times to check.
- WelcomeShorty 4y ago
  Interestingly only the spoken text makes that mistake, the subtitles are correctly stating 30.000 meters.

inciampati 4y ago

And they also have a wonderful mobile weather app, also called "yr"!

Nanite 4y ago
Which, at least for the Oslo area, offers more reliable predictions than Apple's weather app (which is always weather.com, afaik) Having said that, and having the Norwegian Meteorological Institute down the road from where I live, their local predictions are often completely off on rain, to the point I always bring a raincoat when going out.
- semi-extrinsic 4y ago
  For local rainfall predictions, the best solution is to look at the weather radar service they have.
- kebman 4y ago
  I prefer the weather radar for that. Actual clouds and the live direction they're going in is a great predictor of rain. In fact I'd love to improve lightning detection by making a script that also takes into account wind direction, since lightning tends to travel with clouds. It could be as easy as using an ellipsis directed as a kind of weather vane, perhaps stretching out with wind speed. Currently I use a simple circular distance calculation to detect proximity.
hggh 4y ago
Beware, the Android version forces you to activate Google Play Services
tomduncalf 4y ago
Came here to say this, I love the app, it has the nicest UI of all the weather apps I’ve tried and seems fairly accurate. I was tipped off about it by friends in a ski resort who say it’s the most accurate for them in terms of predicting snowfall, bluebird days etc. Unfortunately it doesn’t give “next hour” precipitation info for the UK though so I use AccuWeather for this… but find Yr much clearer for longer range weather.

ducktective 4y ago

I wonder how does it compare to "wttr.in". They apparently use WorldWeatherOnline for source. Also heads up, the NMI provides a nifty dashboard available as pdf and svg: https://developer.yr.no/doc/guides/deprecating-old-widgets/ https://developer.yr.no/doc/guides/deprecating-old-widgets/

INTPenis 4y ago
From my perspective as a Swede I've never been satisfied with any international weather API. I've completely lost faith in them. For years now I've only used the official Swedish meteorological institute (SMHI) app. It used to suck so bad that a lot of Swedes used the Yr app or the Danish DMI app. But it's been vastly improved.
- fruit2020 4y ago
  Kind of the same in the Netherlands. There’s a website buienradar.nl where you can see the clouds movement and you can see in advance when it’s going to rain on you, which for me is the most relevant weather fact.
- kebman 4y ago
  As far as I know there's a lot of cooperation between the Nordic weather institutes to make their predictions work better. Certainly one example are the weather radars which seem to be standardized and connected in the Nordics.

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]

shp0ngle 4y ago

The last time I looked at it, they wanted to artificially limit the number of people using it, by doing all the developer documentation just in Norwegian. I see that’s no longer the case and all docs are in English. edit: I guess my memory is wrong, because all the archive.org API docs websites are in English.

ducktective 4y ago
[edited out due to further explanations]
- shp0ngle 4y ago
  I don’t understand what you mean. Maybe my memory is wrong, it was a long time ago. But I really remember they even wrote explicitly it’s to limit people from using it, or something similar. If I had time now I would look into web archive to check if my memory is not deceiving me
mytailorisrich 4y ago
You should take it as a nice bonus if they publish their docs in English rather than as a given, especially when it's free and from a country where English is not the language.
- Broken_Hippo 4y ago
  I'm still a bit surprised these weren't available in English. It isn't the language of the country, but children start learning it at age 6. A lot of masters and PhD courses are taught in English, and some workplaces use it quite a bit, especially if they do collaborations with other countries. This would fall in that last category. I can find a lot of information from the government in English, and all of my immigration paperwork was in English - they don't require you to further translate into Norwegian. I can mostly get by using English, but Norwegian is needed to integrate and it makes a social life easier. norwegian is necessary for most jobs, though. Edit: To illustrate it even more: Graffiti is in english half of the time and Norwenglish exists.

politelemon 4y ago

The eink dashboard project I'm using[1] has an option to get weather from Metno, what I like about their API is that the only "API key" required is passing a contact email address in the user agent so they can notify you of any problems, abuse, or breaking changes etc.[2] so to me it feels like an honour system. Of course only time will tell whether this generosity is abused and they have to lock it down. 1: https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display https://github.com/mendhak/waveshare-epaper-display 2:https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/ https://developer.yr.no/doc/TermsOfService/

solardev 4y ago

Where do they get their data from? Do the various national weather agencies share data with each other?

input_sh 4y ago
> Do the various national weather agencies share data with each other? Yes, via a UN body called World Meteorological Organization. They have 193 members, only missing a dozen or so island nations.
- solardev 4y ago
  Does that mean all weather apps have the same source data?
  - cube00 4y ago
    I can't imagine even the likes of Apple with their WeatherKit want to have to deal with installing and maintaining their own physical meteorological sensors in every country.
    - solardev 4y ago
      I don't know about installation of physical devices, but it'd be cool to see Big Tech teaming up with the weather folks for developing mesh protocols, analytical techniques, data optimizations, etc. Or maybe that's all done already? I dunno. Kinda like how IBM owns the Weather Channel.
  - chrismeller 4y ago
    Very much no. A lot of them are, somewhat sadly but predictably, targeted at larger markets and therefore pull data from NOAA for the US, the UK Met, and the German weather service (DWD), etc. but then fill in the gaps with something like NOAA that will provide predictions for everywhere in the world. You also quickly get into different models that are used by different services, usually because they work better in the specific environment they're targeting. For instance, Estonia and Finland, possibly with some others, collaborate on their own weather model that works pretty well in the Baltics. There are also highly-regarded models like the ones provided by ECMWF that are only available for a fee, so a lot of apps won't include them, instead preferring to simply use NOAA because it's free for everywhere.

bcraven 4y ago

In Home Assistant the default 'met' platform uses Met.no. According to the docs it "was introduced in Home Assistant 0.79, and it's used by 67.9% of the active installations." https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/met/ https://www.home-assistant.io/integrations/met/

gingerlime 4y ago
works great but has a couple of limitations compared to darksky. For example I couldn’t find a badge showing percipitation probability or even humidity (there’s one badge for everything?). The hourly forecast is disabled by default for some reason. luckily easy to enable once you know about it.
moontear 4y ago
I‘m not sure how this is relevant to the post, but just mentioning that the 67,9% just indicates that this much installations are using this integration (met). Since this is the default weather provider in HA and everybody wants weather the high percentage makes sense.

kebman 4y ago

They have a lot of cool stuff. For instance I made this small script to instantly detect nearby lightning strikes without having to look at their map.[1] I use it to alert me when I need to turn off sensitive equipment. Caveat: It only works in the Nordics. Or, well, it'll probably work outside the Nordics as well, but it's kinda pointless if you don't live there lol. 1: https://gist.github.com/kebman/0d624a9d22c754658b6eee53eab951b2 https://gist.github.com/kebman/0d624a9d22c754658b6eee53eab95...

semi-extrinsic 4y ago

In addition to stuff like running this open API, they also provide free and openly available weather modelling and forecast for southern Africa. To me this feels like one of the best examples of how to provide aid for developing countries, by giving them information that enables everyone from fishers and farmers to governments to make better decisions.

sgiratch 4y ago
Actually 2 / 3 of all users for Yr are from outside Norway https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/nordland/yr.no-populaer-over-hele-verden-fordi-det-er-en-gratis-vaertjeneste.-hedres-av-unicef-og-norad.-1.15645054?_x_tr_sl=no&_x_tr_tl=en&_x_tr_hl=en-US&_x_tr_pto=wapp https://www-nrk-no.translate.goog/nordland/yr.no-populaer-ov...

timonoko 4y ago

Annoying part is that tide & current prediction comes from Kartverket.no and those two Government Offices cannot combine information. Issues are very much related.