Looks like this is being done under contract/partnership with 18F (GSA): https://18f.gsa.gov/
> The fundamental problem that we’ve observed is that weather.gov reflects its organizational silos (Conway's Law) more than its users’ needs. A lack of overall strategy, feedback/monitoring, and tools have perpetuated this problem.
Wow, my org would not have the guts to write that down in a public README!
US Digital Service and 18F have done a huge service by normalizing the ability for agencies to say, "Heh, this sucks, but we're going to make it better." That safety is half the battle, otherwise there is no incentive for stakeholders to put their guard down and collaborate on a cohesive solution ("bureaucracy hacking").
Building trust and relationships is an underrated component of these transformation efforts.
Silos happen. I'm not willing to spread blame. I will aside some of my frustration if I know it's an acknowledged problem and there's willingness to address it.
I've found the problem with transparency and any sort of acknowledgement of problems in business, is that there too many other people whoa are all too willing to say, "We're awesome, just leave it to us!" And these are usually the teams that have the biggest problems and rely on silos to prevent others from seeing how bad it is.
It still seems like there is quite a bit of siloing, though. The Office of Water Prediction for example runs its own GitHub org, has its own sites separate from water.weather.gov at preview.water.noaa.gov and again at water.noaa.gov/map, but all their field observations actually come from the USGS who host data and web services at waterdata.usgs.gov.
Dumb question but is this 2.0 live somewhere I can use it or just source code in development?
I remember about 8 years ago there was an "experimental" site for one of the US government's aviation weather products. And it was so very good, designed modern and usable and clean. Didn't look at all like the usual awkward government website. The team seemed like nice folks too but were caught up in some multi-year government funding system. It eventually got shut down and IIRC, none of their work ever got promoted to the main site.
We are very lucky in the US to have a fantastic weather service and a mandate for their products to be free and public domain. Unfortunately there's also a lot of political pressure on them to not be too good so that some commercial company can profit. AccuWeather was one such company, at least back in 2005: https://www.onthecommons.org/privatizing-weather/index.html
Barry Myers / Accuweather would love nothing more than to privatize all weather forecasting services, which means I, and my colleagues at SPC, would be out of a job
I've found it to be the exact opposite. It doesn't work well at all on mobile. It's overwhelmingly complex for anyone looking for something simple and useful like what was offered before. It's incredibly slow and has more limited useful information compared to its predecessor.
I wonder if this will impact api.weather.gov.. I hacked a little wunderground inspired dashboard a while back (https://weather.nikolaj.dev) that I still use most days.. but have stalled out a bit in rolling my own marine forecast for surf reports. Would love if they finally populated those fields (saves me figuring out the grib files)
Nit: it redirected me to San Diego weather after a few seconds after I had already put in a different location. Maybe because I block the location request?
I wish there was a single place where all government related (open-source) projects are listed; maybe a usa-gov organization on GitHub where all repos can be easily accessible.
It's not exactly a single place, but this page [0] lists the Github organizations for many federal agencies. It's not comprehensive, notably it's missing the NSA organization [1].
GitHub doesn’t really allow nested or even related organizations so it would be a nightmare to have all repos in a single org.
There is a GitHub for government [0] but it relies on contribs and isn’t very complete.
GSA started code.gov under the Obama administration with the aim to create a single index of all government projects. It withered under Trump and was basically defunded under Biden so they don’t really do much other than link out to major agencies and there’s no longer a requirement to timely index.
My org has like a 1000 repos and we’re one of hundreds of agencies so I can’t imagine collecting all these together without a little effort. The original code.gov worked pretty well as everyone just dropped a code.json file onto their web site and GSA scooped them up and combined them into a single. So it’s a real shame they stopped doing that, and stopped asking people to publish their code.jsons as it was a good idea.
I'm not trying to start trouble, but GitHub is not the only game in town and GitLab for sure allows nested groups, with their own permission structures, with the extra benefit that the government could host their own GitLab instance for extra benefits
Merely as a point of reference, https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories cites they currently have 6100 repos with another 2200 in /orgs/Azure so 10000 in an GH org wouldn't be unprecedented. I couldn't readily find any way to cough up their other top-level brands, and the "topics" seem to apply only to the repos themselves, not to the GH Organizations
Yes, I have a window manager hotkey to pop up the hourly weather image for my location in mpv, I recommend this as a good way to get a quick look at the weather today or tomorrow. I also have a shell alias to use kitten icat to display it in the terminal, although I use the mpv hotkey more. I also have a text weather alias in the terminal that just calls curl on the file that matches my location under:
I just looked through my state to find the right file but it looks like the "More Local Wx" link from the 7 day forcast page has the right name for the file (ORZ006 in my case).
I also have a few icat aliases to show radar; one for current, one for sequential, and one looping from this page (radar name same as on radar.weather.gov):
However, I find the one hour accumulation view to be best and I couldn't find a way to get images for that view so I usually look at radar.weather.gov if it works (it has been working better lately but sometimes just doesn't work for me).
I haven't ended up looking at them often but I also made some icat aliases for 6-10 day and monthly temperature and precipitation outlook from:
I see there is a contributing.MD file, but it’s hard for me to really tell how I can contribute. As a perspective contributor, it would be nice to know how best to contribute.
Readit News
> The fundamental problem that we’ve observed is that weather.gov reflects its organizational silos (Conway's Law) more than its users’ needs. A lack of overall strategy, feedback/monitoring, and tools have perpetuated this problem.
Wow, my org would not have the guts to write that down in a public README!
Building trust and relationships is an underrated component of these transformation efforts.
Silos happen. I'm not willing to spread blame. I will aside some of my frustration if I know it's an acknowledged problem and there's willingness to address it.
This makes me worried that they're going to add some "analytics" tracking scripts in there that come with those damned annoying cookie pop-ups.
Details here: https://digital.gov/guides/dap/common-questions-about-dap/
So, no cookie popup
I remember about 8 years ago there was an "experimental" site for one of the US government's aviation weather products. And it was so very good, designed modern and usable and clean. Didn't look at all like the usual awkward government website. The team seemed like nice folks too but were caught up in some multi-year government funding system. It eventually got shut down and IIRC, none of their work ever got promoted to the main site.
We are very lucky in the US to have a fantastic weather service and a mandate for their products to be free and public domain. Unfortunately there's also a lot of political pressure on them to not be too good so that some commercial company can profit. AccuWeather was one such company, at least back in 2005: https://www.onthecommons.org/privatizing-weather/index.html
https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/tree/main/.github...
Deleted Comment
https://github.com/weather-gov/weather.gov/blob/smh--researc...
Nit: it redirected me to San Diego weather after a few seconds after I had already put in a different location. Maybe because I block the location request?
[0] https://code.gov/agencies
[1] https://github.com/nationalsecurityagency
There is a GitHub for government [0] but it relies on contribs and isn’t very complete.
GSA started code.gov under the Obama administration with the aim to create a single index of all government projects. It withered under Trump and was basically defunded under Biden so they don’t really do much other than link out to major agencies and there’s no longer a requirement to timely index.
My org has like a 1000 repos and we’re one of hundreds of agencies so I can’t imagine collecting all these together without a little effort. The original code.gov worked pretty well as everyone just dropped a code.json file onto their web site and GSA scooped them up and combined them into a single. So it’s a real shame they stopped doing that, and stopped asking people to publish their code.jsons as it was a good idea.
[0] https://government.github.com/community/
Merely as a point of reference, https://github.com/orgs/microsoft/repositories cites they currently have 6100 repos with another 2200 in /orgs/Azure so 10000 in an GH org wouldn't be unprecedented. I couldn't readily find any way to cough up their other top-level brands, and the "topics" seem to apply only to the repos themselves, not to the GH Organizations
But for a universal (any host, any government) dataset contributing to wikidata would be helpful, and in the fullness of time I'd like to use that to cross-validate and identify missing entries https://github.com/github/government.github.com/issues/877 but the properties available probably need work to get there, right now there's e.g., https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1324 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P2037 https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P8827
Example: https://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=37.7771&lon=-1...
https://tgftp.nws.noaa.gov/data/forecasts/zone/
I just looked through my state to find the right file but it looks like the "More Local Wx" link from the 7 day forcast page has the right name for the file (ORZ006 in my case).
I also have a few icat aliases to show radar; one for current, one for sequential, and one looping from this page (radar name same as on radar.weather.gov):
https://radar.weather.gov/ridge/standard/
However, I find the one hour accumulation view to be best and I couldn't find a way to get images for that view so I usually look at radar.weather.gov if it works (it has been working better lately but sometimes just doesn't work for me).
I haven't ended up looking at them often but I also made some icat aliases for 6-10 day and monthly temperature and precipitation outlook from:
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/610day/
https://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/predictions/30day/
sharing in hopes it's helpful, not to be pedantic