For context, from the court ruling (BGH, DeepL translation):
Originally, it was envisaged that all services provided by the DWD to the general public for public dissemination via modern means of communication, such as mobile devices via an app, as specified in Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge (Explanatory Memorandum to the Government Draft of a First Law Amending the Law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 22). The Bundesrat has commented on this and raised competition law concerns about the tax-funded DWD making meteorological and climatological services available to the end consumer free of charge, because such a free charge constitutes an impediment to established private-sector providers and erects barriers to market entry for new providers or new offerings (explanatory memorandum to the government draft of a first law amending the law on the German Meteorological Service, BT-Drucks. 18/11533, S. 25). The version of Section 6 (2a) DWDG that has become law is based on the resolution recommendation and report of the Bundestag Committee on Transport and Digital Infrastructure (BT-Drucks. 18/12836, p. 2), according to which not all services provided by the DWD to the general public pursuant to Section 4 (1) DWDG should be free of charge, but only those pursuant to Section 4 (1) Nos. 3 and 7 DWDG.
They still publish all their data free of charge and are required to do so by law. For weather forecast, they dump all parameters of their recent model runs.
So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...
New Zealanders pay taxes for a weather agency and a separate climate agency, neither of which provides weather local for most farms (one farm client of my agtech automation business is an hour from town; the weather report only applies to town).
Additionally, the weather service is a "state owned enterprise" expected to turn a profit.
So everyone who needs farm weather uses yr.no
After covid, I'm going to go talk to some politicians about our weather forecasting problem.
In the past The Weather Channel lobbied to get public access shut down but failed but most people selling weather data compete by building improved forecasts, local knowledge, etc on top of NWS data. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into the space.
I have a weather app on Android and, as a New Zealander, wanted to include NZ data. MetService made it difficult and costly. When I asked how much for radar data, they essentially asked how much the app earned. I wrote to MP Megan Woods about this but never got a reply. Philip Duncan of WeatherWatch in NZ has fought this in the past. There is also a PriceWaterhouseCooper report on MetService:
My weather app has five weather models that cover NZ include a high resolution model from Expedition Marine, an NZ based meteorologist. I hope to bring model farming related weather data in the future.
Is weather forecast enough for agtech business. Until recently I was in that industry and apparently the local weather station was the way to go for accurate predictions. we have a few of these hardware companies here in Europe and always wondered why this was necessary, knowing that we have some of the most accurate predictions here in central europe. How is it for you in NZ?
Who are you planning to talk to? A National MP will be in favour of just selling it and then bungle the IPO returning very little to the government. A Labour MP will propose opening it up but then get distracted trying to pass other legislation that nobody wants.
That aside you might make some progress talking to the Greens if you framed it as an environmental issue.
Apple api - nope. Norwegian Meteorological Institute api - yup.
That’s mostly in jest though (sent from an iphone) but also because Apple bought darksky (which was my preferred weather api/source in the past) and I’d assume that’s a big part of/rolled into the weatherkit offerings now?
I loved dark sky, I'm using it for my own smart home app, but I should move away from it much earlier, because it just became so inaccurate I can no longer rely on it. I don't know if this is for my region only, or a country (Poland) or whatever, but if a forecast says it will rain for 7 days straight and there is no rain, but the rain falled immediately after forecast stopped showing any rain then it's worthless to use.
I don't know if Weather Kit will provide the same accuracy.
I'm in a process of switching to Open Weather Map right now, I started when apple announced Weather Kit to Dark Sky users via mail. But I will try this Norwegian API as well.
I've been using Dark Sky for years but I uninstalled it yesterday. Since the acquisition, the native Weather app has been massively upgraded with a lot of Dark Sky's best features and is very good now.
I ran the two in parallel for a few months to compare the alerts and accuracy. Weather won out.
Yr (Norwegian word meaning drizzle rain) is indeed truly excellent, but it should be noted that while its coverage is global, their forecasts outside of Europe are based on lower-accuracy models.
Do they actually do these forecasts themselves, aren't they cooperating with other meteorological agencies and sharing not only data but also forecasts?
Does it have equally good data as WeatherKit? I vaguely remember that yr.no shows raw ECMWF data. WeatherKit probably provides weather.com data, which are postprocessed from ECMWF and perhaps other models and they provide the best forecasts.
The main issue with raw model data is that they are not adjusted for local altitude.
I learned in a meeting at my last job that many weather apps solely exist to collect and sell location data. Don’t have specific evidence but it seemed to be par for the course. So I’m glad to see this API, hopefully it’ll help more privacy focused weather apps thrive.
Apple has continued to take on services third parties previously used to exploit the private information of Apple’s customers.
This includes Apple Card, but also the recently introduced multi-week payment options Apple is offering to buy its products. (Previously offered by other services “for free.”)
I have no doubt that Apple is looking at how data is leaking across the ecosystem and is seeking to stop it as much as possible.
> I have no doubt that Apple is looking at how data is leaking across the ecosystem and is seeking to stop it as much as possible.
I have no doubt that Apple is looking to exploit it to their exclusive advantage as much as possible, while marketing it under the guise of their privacy measures.
There is a whole ecosystem of apps that exist only to justify permissions. Weather and emergency alert/extreme weather notification apps are the most common ones to harvest location data from users in the background.
Seems like a REST API is available, but you’ll have to be in the Apple developer program to access it. I think this might be to allow previous Dark Sky API users to continue using it.
Oops, that's what I get for not reading closely enough! In my defense, my eyes glazed over after the fourth Apple-product-OS version number ;) but yes, my bad on that
Looks like it's 500k calls per month per Apple Developer Program account, so essentially $99/yr. Not totally unreasonable pricing, although I wish I could buy it a la carte. It's a bit out of my price range for hobby projects. If I ever start developing apps for my family members (who mostly have iPhones at this point) though this will be a nice freebie to come with that. Ah well.
A quiet note of appreciation for Adam Grossman, one of the co-founders of Dark Sky. It's one thing to have an idea about a weather app, quite another to pursue it successfully within a small design agency and then make it polished enough over the years to sell it to a giant corporation like Apple. Even during that acquisition, Grossman went to bat for DarkSky's users, making sure that the API was kept live (for 2+ years running now). Post-acquisition, he has evidently become comfortable enough in a corporate environment to help evangelize the API's transition to an Apple-native SDK and Swift API. The creation of the REST API with a full mapping guide means that Grossman continues to bat for DarkSky API developers. The use of the native Swift API to create brand new Apple weather apps also appears to be well done. All-in-all, it has been a remarkable journey from a small, independent agency to a large corporate while keeping core values alive, a journey where many others have flamed out. An inspiration to all. Hats off to you, Grossman!
I’m looking forward to it, but it might be a while, before I can rely on it. It’s almost certainly iOS 16 (and above)-only. I always write my apps to support (at least) one version back, at time of release.
I’m also interested in weather (*<|:o) or not it will be completely free to use, or if there will be some attempt to monetize (like the current Weather app takes you to that God-awful Weather Channel page, if you want anything other than a summary).
At least, I hope the built-in app finally becomes usable.
This summer, I decided to build a better weather website with my 8 year old as an educational project. We have found that the weather forecasts in our area are terrible and decided we could build a more accurate prediction algorithm.
I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating for someone as inexperienced as me, and (3) it allows us to get something off the ground relatively quickly.
Anyone have suggestions for what technologies to use, or if there are sample weather websites that we can look at and model after?
edit: just to clarify, I'm not talking about the tech stack for making predictions, just for the user-facing website. We have already developed an algorithm that predicts weather much more accurately than any weather website/app we've been able to find, in our local area. We are not looking outside our local area at this time.
i think you should probably start by reassessing your expectations. creating accurate weather forecasts is a huge industry worth billions of dollars, and is a very hard problem.
creating a better prediction algorithm is probably not something that's going to be achievable for an inexperienced programmer and their 8-year-old.
We'd like to have our website display comparisons, so people can see how much more accurate we are than other websites. Not sure whether there are IP rules that would stop us from displaying someone else's forecasts though. Don't want to land in hot water for some simple summer project!
You say you’re trying to build a more accurate prediction algorithm to beat meteorologists. Given that goal, you should probably look to acquire a supercomputer first; tech stack wouldn’t be a concern until then.
For our local area, it was actually trivial to develop a better weather prediction algorithm. We're not looking to build something for the whole world, which would be very difficult. At this point, I'm just trying to sort out the tech stack for the website, now that we have our prediction algorithm figured out. We'll of course optimize it over time, but even our v1 blows weather.com out of the water.
Glad to see this released publicly! I used it internally last year, and it was frustrating but useful (mostly relating to not having access rights and quickly changing versions).
Readit News
https://developer.yr.no
Only the free app was deemed anticompetitive. All the data is available: Geoservers: https://maps.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (weather and warnings) https://cdc.dwd.de/geoserver/web/ (climate infomarmation) https://www.dwd.de/DE/leistungen/geodienste/geodienste.html (Overview)
You are also free to embed all the information from the website (maps, etc.) and there is also the raw data server: https://opendata.dwd.de/
So I guess I'm saying that you can already build such a system yourself quite trivially...
Additionally, the weather service is a "state owned enterprise" expected to turn a profit.
So everyone who needs farm weather uses yr.no
After covid, I'm going to go talk to some politicians about our weather forecasting problem.
They also publish the data for free, such as map layers/radar https://opengeo.ncep.noaa.gov/geoserver/www/index.html or the weather forecasts https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/weather-climate-models/na...
In the past The Weather Channel lobbied to get public access shut down but failed but most people selling weather data compete by building improved forecasts, local knowledge, etc on top of NWS data. It greatly lowers the barrier to entry for anyone wanting to get into the space.
https://www.mbie.govt.nz/assets/5b3b826f79/weather-permittin...
My weather app has five weather models that cover NZ include a high resolution model from Expedition Marine, an NZ based meteorologist. I hope to bring model farming related weather data in the future.
Deleted Comment
what do you mean? are there still restrictions in NZ?
That aside you might make some progress talking to the Greens if you framed it as an environmental issue.
Here is Oslo: https://www.yr.no/en/content/1-72837/meteogram.svg
That’s mostly in jest though (sent from an iphone) but also because Apple bought darksky (which was my preferred weather api/source in the past) and I’d assume that’s a big part of/rolled into the weatherkit offerings now?
I don't know if Weather Kit will provide the same accuracy.
I'm in a process of switching to Open Weather Map right now, I started when apple announced Weather Kit to Dark Sky users via mail. But I will try this Norwegian API as well.
I ran the two in parallel for a few months to compare the alerts and accuracy. Weather won out.
The main issue with raw model data is that they are not adjusted for local altitude.
I think weather underground did i.e. until Apple gulped it.
This includes Apple Card, but also the recently introduced multi-week payment options Apple is offering to buy its products. (Previously offered by other services “for free.”)
I have no doubt that Apple is looking at how data is leaking across the ecosystem and is seeking to stop it as much as possible.
I’m curious to see what else is in the works.
I have no doubt that Apple is looking to exploit it to their exclusive advantage as much as possible, while marketing it under the guise of their privacy measures.
Credit card companies have been doing this for decades.
Edit: my bad for skimming too fast, I'm glad there's a REST API, that's unexpected and cool!
I hope they continue to support Darksky, at least until the Apple Weather app is on par with it.
Some bad news: iOS app support ends at the end of this year, and the API/website gets yanked next March.
https://blog.darksky.net/
Looks like it's 500k calls per month per Apple Developer Program account, so essentially $99/yr. Not totally unreasonable pricing, although I wish I could buy it a la carte. It's a bit out of my price range for hobby projects. If I ever start developing apps for my family members (who mostly have iPhones at this point) though this will be a nice freebie to come with that. Ah well.
I’m also interested in weather (*<|:o) or not it will be completely free to use, or if there will be some attempt to monetize (like the current Weather app takes you to that God-awful Weather Channel page, if you want anything other than a summary).
At least, I hope the built-in app finally becomes usable.
[UPDATED TO ADD]:
Looks like it’s sort of “the Google API” model (https://developer.apple.com/weatherkit/get-started/).
If your app isn’t that popular (like most of mine), then it’s free (with attribution).
I haven't coded in 20 years (and never did any web dev), and I'm trying to figure out what tech stack to use so that my (1) it's comprehensible to my kid, (2) it's not too frustrating for someone as inexperienced as me, and (3) it allows us to get something off the ground relatively quickly.
Anyone have suggestions for what technologies to use, or if there are sample weather websites that we can look at and model after?
edit: just to clarify, I'm not talking about the tech stack for making predictions, just for the user-facing website. We have already developed an algorithm that predicts weather much more accurately than any weather website/app we've been able to find, in our local area. We are not looking outside our local area at this time.
creating a better prediction algorithm is probably not something that's going to be achievable for an inexperienced programmer and their 8-year-old.
You could also let the user choose which model to use or show a comparison.
I'm doing something related and my next step is compare models vs current weather to see which I model is more accurate.
As models change and sometimes depend on current conditions this is something that you should never stop doing (comparing which model is better)