Another one bites the dust. I've used weather underground api, yahoo weather api, dark sky api, and all of them have gone from free to paid (or just not public anymore) over the years. Currently using pirate weather - https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/
Is there any way people would be incentivized to setup a little weather station/contribute to data and get paid. Wonder if there's a model where people could make money/not game the system too. It would have to be standardized/verified to be accurate somehow.
Blockchain people have been trying variations of this for a decade. Any time you create a system that pays people for data, it will be exploited to the extreme.
I don’t think you need to incentivize people to provide weather data. Just make it easy to set up a station and get a lot of people interested. There are already hobby stations out there and networks for them.
This is primarily for air quality by default, but you can get temperature, humidity, etc as well. For each station, someone paid for the hardware and is sharing the data gratis.
I'd be a little surprised if Google (or even Apple) haven't considered trying to use cell phone temp and pressure sensor data collected across the entire fleet of devices running their OS. Similar to the recent Android earthquake warning thing, or Google's traffic data.
Like others have pointed out though, gathering observation data is only part of the problem. Turning current and historical observations into usable and accurate forecasts is a big compute heavy task, and whoever is paying for that compute needs either government funding, which is not easy in the age of DOGE, or to charge for the forecasts.
I have a weather station that collects temp, pressure, wind speed and direction rainfall - and which has wifi and built in capability to send it's data to a bunch of web services. Sadly, it's still in the box it came in because I haven't got around to installing it and the burst of enthusiasm the inspired me to buy it has long since died. (If anyone in Sydney Australia wants it, reply here and we might be able to organise for you to come collect it.)
>It would have to be standardized/verified to be accurate somehow.
You could do something that for the same zip/county, aggregates the results based on a certain percentage. You could weight it based on how many times a user is outside this range. (e.g. bad actors)
I just got zigbee working in my house (SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway). Is there any recommended weather nuts out there that could recommend a weather device (that they like and is cool), just in case someone wants to create a project and is looking for data providers.
There are a few models for community data collection/distribution that appear reasonably successful in ADS-B and bird tracking with commercial, non-commercial and academic examples. The challenge is that there are hard costs to collecting/persisting/distributing the data which are incompatible with free (which in reality just means someone else pays).
This feels like a great thing for the government to do which is why NOAA/NWS have traditionally maintained these services. The data these stations produce nationally is valuable but hard to quantify on an individual station level - should the station that detects vital data about a hurricane be given a large bonus for it? If so we'll end up with extremely lopsided coverage while the information from nearby weather systems can be invaluable.
same model as flightaware et al use for crowdsourced ADS-B air traffic monitoring. You set up an ADS-B receiving station, send your feed to FA, and in return you get a premium-level account.
> The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year[...]
They may be included with your $99/year subscription, but to call them "free" is like saying that the groceries I'm holding are free because I just gave the cashier money.
I feel its not nearly as useful as the old darksky api. The secret sauce of that software was that it combined typical weather data with local reports. Afaik there is no way to submit a weather report on the apple weather app. They bought it for the name and to kill a competing option essentially vs attempting to use what made that app actually compelling compared to other weather apps.
If the sabotage proceeds, effects will be felt by nautical, aviation, agriculture, commerce, water management, hydroelectric, and on and on. Weather is critical infrastructure for everything like roads and power. It can't be replaced by privatization.
> “These form a colossal operation that has become one of the main drivers of the climate change alarm industry and, as such, is harmful to future U.S. prosperity,” Project 2025 says. “This industry’s mission emphasis on prediction and management seems designed around the fatal conceit of planning for the unplannable.”
Shoot the messenger and bury your head in the sand!
This is one I don't really understand why the change would be a huge deal in context, the framing of an article as republicans sabotaging the miracle of free weather report APIs is just confusing.
If our government were massively in debt and continuing to increase the deficit, maybe I'd understand wanting to consider weather report APIs as a public good worth funding with tax dollars. We should be cutting everything we can to avoid a complete train wreck though, why would this float to the top of the list?
The Norwegian meteorological Institute, as well as all European meteorological agencies, shares but also rely on shared data from other agencies, including NOAA. Most of the Atlantic weather buoys, for example...
AccuWeather has been trying to privatize NWS since it's inception. I believe the current head of the NOAA was actually the AccuWeather CEO. IMHO, it's only a matter of time before he shuts off public access to NSW forecase data, no matter the impact on real people and businesses (except maybe AccuWeather).
NWS costs $1.3B a year and the ROI is 5-11x based on reports I can find. So every $1 gives Americans $11 of value. But yeah let’s trash it to save money or whatever…
"excited" and "designed to elevate your experience" is such a weird way to put this. They are introducing more monetization options, which is their right to do. But different monetization options and discontinuation of a free-tier does not elevate anyone's experience.
That's like the old saying that when a company starts its message with "In order to serve you better...", what they really mean is "Bend over and assume the position."
I ran a weather site for a year or so (that also showed YESTERDAY'S weather, that was the key feature) using visual crossing's data, until someone started scraping all the cities of the world every hour and running up my costs (visual crossing is pay-per-data-point) so I had to shut it down.
It surprises me that in 2025 we can't just support global free weather data as some kind of cooperative service. It's not like it's high-bandwidth or even all that high-volume.
The last time I had checked (this was over a year ago) there was nothing that provided world-wide data in a consistent format except the paid APIs, of which only one had a good historical data service.
I could switch my site to just use NWS and be US only I suppose; better than just being completely off. Adding all the weather services of every country in the world is too much for me (and why I guess the paid services are value-add).
- It uses open-meteo's API. Before open-meteo, I tried with OpenWeatherMap's API.
- However, besides requiring an additional call for each previous day's data, OpenWeatherMap's One Call API only supported local time zones for current and forecast data. So depending on the timezone and time, there could be a big gap in the data that needed to be filled with timezone math (and extra API calls. The original DarkSky One Call API did not have this issue.)
Your statements are somewhat contradictory. You said that you were being scraped so you had to shut the service down due to costs... but then you also say that this not a high-bandwidth or high-volume service.
I was the only regular user (it's basically a POC/concept site), so it was extremely low volume except for the scraper(s), who suddenly became high-volume. I could have done more research into scraper/bot blocking but I didn't have the time and needed to respond to the scrapers immediately, so I pulled the plug.
EDIT: I have also since learned of Vercel's bot/scraper blocking features so I'm also going to try turning those on and see if it stops the scraping.
The internet as we know it (blogs etc) is going to stop existing and this will just turn into an protocol layer communicating between said walled gardens
Bit miffed that the big tech orgs basically killed something that could be organic & community driven. If somehow a path could have been found to maintain and possibly even scale that sort of grassroot internet I think it could have turned into something unimaginably awesome. Big tech actively killed that trajectory
Sure Apple, fb and LinkedIn were private gardens before it was cool, but there was still some incentive for some companies to stay public. That is until the AI wars and scrapping the entire internet constantly for training data was the norm.
WalleD gardens and walleT gardens - e.g. micropayments will make it possible to monetize data to the fullest and every users will need a wallet to access anything fresh online. That seems to be the trend, but I suspect a counter-trend will emerge too.
Serious question: what other national or global-level weather services are freely available via API to end users? With AccuWeather going all-in on premium access and the NWS/NOAA being sabotaged, is there anywhere else with freely available high-quality data out there in readily-ingestible formats?
I’ve been building an open-source weather API over the past few years. It pulls in data from a wide range of global and local high-resolution weather models. The API is free to use without an API key, though there are commercial options available. I'm the sole owner behind it. No VC funding or outside backing.
The core tech is tuned for performance, using local gridded files instead of a traditional database or response caching. This efficiency is what allows it to stay free.
Just wanted to say thank you for this service. I have a little homebrew clock I build from a Raspberry Pi and a small display in my bathroom. Below the time, it displays the weather forecast for the day so I know how to dress. That little clock has become an essential piece of my morning routine.
I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.
Awesome, I will change https://weather.bingo to use this service; the previous paid API I used was too expensive to justify given I was the only real user :P.
Love open-meteo - no registration or API key required.
Great for tutorials.
I used it my upcoming O'Reilly book- use weather to predict air quality at the street level:
https://github.com/featurestorebook/mlfs-book/
Just wanted to say, seeing you in the wild, thank you very much for the hard work you do on OpenMeteo.
Picked up a commercial license about 3 months ago, service is amazing and have been using it for helping to provide runtime data analysis and anomaly detection for smart home thermostats.
I've been using their free (2.5?) API for a while and just last week moved on to the paid-but-with-free-tier 3.0 API for more info.
You just need to put in your credit card (most likely to prove you're an actual human being) and that'll net you 1000 requests per day for free.
Then go into the settings and set a hard limit at 999 and you'll never get billed.
If whatever you're doing needs to get weather data more often than once per minute, start charging for it or cache data on your end more aggressively to not hit the limit.
Readit News
I don’t think you need to incentivize people to provide weather data. Just make it easy to set up a station and get a lot of people interested. There are already hobby stations out there and networks for them.
https://map.purpleair.com/
This is primarily for air quality by default, but you can get temperature, humidity, etc as well. For each station, someone paid for the hardware and is sharing the data gratis.
Like others have pointed out though, gathering observation data is only part of the problem. Turning current and historical observations into usable and accurate forecasts is a big compute heavy task, and whoever is paying for that compute needs either government funding, which is not easy in the age of DOGE, or to charge for the forecasts.
I have a weather station that collects temp, pressure, wind speed and direction rainfall - and which has wifi and built in capability to send it's data to a bunch of web services. Sadly, it's still in the box it came in because I haven't got around to installing it and the burst of enthusiasm the inspired me to buy it has long since died. (If anyone in Sydney Australia wants it, reply here and we might be able to organise for you to come collect it.)
We're up against the most basic of human nature here.
https://tempest.earth/tempest-home-weather-system/
You could do something that for the same zip/county, aggregates the results based on a certain percentage. You could weight it based on how many times a user is outside this range. (e.g. bad actors)
I just got zigbee working in my house (SONOFF Zigbee 3.0 USB Dongle Plus Gateway). Is there any recommended weather nuts out there that could recommend a weather device (that they like and is cool), just in case someone wants to create a project and is looking for data providers.
https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-it-works/
https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/
https://www.birdweather.com/about
https://ebird.org/about
It’s now Apple’s WeatherKit.
The first 500K calls a month is free with a $99 a year Apple Developer account and there is a standard REST API for none Apple OS’s.
They may be included with your $99/year subscription, but to call them "free" is like saying that the groceries I'm holding are free because I just gave the cashier money.
Update: https://gizmodo.com/republicans-project-2025-would-end-free-...
It's another attack from within.
Shoot the messenger and bury your head in the sand!
John Oliver did an episode on this during Trump 1.0:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMGn9T37eR8
* https://www.imdb.com/title/tt11110660/
* s06e26: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Last_Week_Tonight_with...
* https://old.reddit.com/r/television/comments/dhmo0c/weather_...
If our government were massively in debt and continuing to increase the deficit, maybe I'd understand wanting to consider weather report APIs as a public good worth funding with tax dollars. We should be cutting everything we can to avoid a complete train wreck though, why would this float to the top of the list?
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/as-trump-slashed-weath...
Yes. Yes, I'm sure you are.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2firijxQOo
It surprises me that in 2025 we can't just support global free weather data as some kind of cooperative service. It's not like it's high-bandwidth or even all that high-volume.
I could switch my site to just use NWS and be US only I suppose; better than just being completely off. Adding all the weather services of every country in the world is too much for me (and why I guess the paid services are value-add).
- It uses open-meteo's API. Before open-meteo, I tried with OpenWeatherMap's API.
- However, besides requiring an additional call for each previous day's data, OpenWeatherMap's One Call API only supported local time zones for current and forecast data. So depending on the timezone and time, there could be a big gap in the data that needed to be filled with timezone math (and extra API calls. The original DarkSky One Call API did not have this issue.)
- I even blogged about this over 10 years ago: https://blog.leftium.com/2013/12/how-to-display-temperature-...
- Previous version used to show two historical days: https://github.com/Leftium/ultra-weather
- The current version is capable of showing the previous 90 days. I plan to add a weekly overview with two previous days.
BTW the https://open-meteo.com API supports getting historical and forecast data in a single call. All other API's require at least two calls.
EDIT: I have also since learned of Vercel's bot/scraper blocking features so I'm also going to try turning those on and see if it stops the scraping.
The internet as we know it (blogs etc) is going to stop existing and this will just turn into an protocol layer communicating between said walled gardens
Bit miffed that the big tech orgs basically killed something that could be organic & community driven. If somehow a path could have been found to maintain and possibly even scale that sort of grassroot internet I think it could have turned into something unimaginably awesome. Big tech actively killed that trajectory
The core tech is tuned for performance, using local gridded files instead of a traditional database or response caching. This efficiency is what allows it to stay free.
You can try it here: https://open-meteo.com
I switched to Open Meteo a few months ago when the previous API I was using quit working. It's been rock solid and such a nice user experience compared to everything else I tried.
Picked up a commercial license about 3 months ago, service is amazing and have been using it for helping to provide runtime data analysis and anomaly detection for smart home thermostats.
We've been using OWM but the One Call API quickly gets pricey when traffic spikes.
They also provide yr.no which is widely used worldwide.
I've been using their free (2.5?) API for a while and just last week moved on to the paid-but-with-free-tier 3.0 API for more info.
You just need to put in your credit card (most likely to prove you're an actual human being) and that'll net you 1000 requests per day for free.
Then go into the settings and set a hard limit at 999 and you'll never get billed.
If whatever you're doing needs to get weather data more often than once per minute, start charging for it or cache data on your end more aggressively to not hit the limit.
You can see a literal example of that thinking in the comments of _heimdall for whom valuable commons are unexploited business cases.
how would you feel if you were the SWE on the other side of this API and people demand it for free
Dead Comment
Unfortunately, the API for searching for a location is terrible and often gets locations wrong.