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.
While that detail is true, the real problem is much more general: you have goal x, you use some proxy y for that goal, you pay people for y, they give you lots of y that may end up being the exact opposite of x.
Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".
Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.
Incentives do work in general. Sometimes they are abused. Incentives with no checks and balances are always abused. I don’t think the generalized problem you discuss above is broadly general
Incentives can work, but most governments and businesses are still only mediocre at them even with enough money to throw at the problem they get to do do-overs when they get it wrong.
Trying to do this with humans on a big scale combines the worst of software development in the days of punched cards, working without anyone having given you a formal language spec, and black-hat hackers on the modern internet.
It is very very easy to pick your incentives badly; you only get feedback on a very slow cycle (in the punched card days you might run the program overnight and only find it crashed on line 32 from a typo the next morning, but it's much slower than that in meatspace); and you also need constant fine-tuning as people interested in gaming the system share their methods for doing so.
Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput. I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes: https://www.helium.com/
It doesn’t work as well as they wanted and it has been subject to various exploits over the years from people figuring out how to fake the participation to extract rewards.
>>Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as
trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for
most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model.
Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot
avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the
minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions
From the bitcoin white paper.
>I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes
TON blockchain showed throughput above 100k per second, about 3x more of visa. There are other blockchains with similar throughput claims. L2 networks can give even lower fees and higher throughput.
I don't think they were saying to use blockchain to do this. It's just an example that shows that if you offer financial incentives in exchange for data people will exploit it and gameify it. The reason blockchain clearance rates are so slow is because of all the effort to prevent this. You could remove PoW from bitcoin and the network would be significantly faster. It would also be dominated by people exploiting it.
It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.
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.
You’ve just described Ambient Weather. What I find kinda funny about that is they still try to upsell you to get more than 1 year of data retention.
Luckily, they allow you to configure additional arbitrary locations to pump data to. I wrote a little program to drop that data into an InfluxDB database (along with PurpleAir, AirGradient, AirThings, Solar Data, and Iotawatt). The only practical use I’ve found is to look and see “When was the last time we head three days in a row that were so windy?” I suppose I could do fun stuff with Home Assistant too.
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.)
Is there a feasible way to turn noisy cell phone temperature data into reliable weather data? Cell phones can be indoors; they can be in someone's pocket next to their body heat; they can be in direct sunlight; and they can generate a lot of heat themselves under load. And it's not just outlier phones that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature; it's probably the majority of phones at any given time.
But I barely understand how shit works when you operate at Google scale.
I wonder how many "Android-ish" devices like maybe in car entertainment systems are out there and reporting all their telemetry data back to Google? I wonder how much "Android" is in vehicles with AndroidAuto, and whether that hardware typically has temperature and pressure sensors like phones do?
If I had, say, a billion cars sending me data that includes temp, location, and possibly some vehicle specific CANBUS type data - I'd guess there could possibly be a signal in there that could reliably report temps and pressures at locations, based on heuristics that identify cars parked outdoors.
Same with phones. At the scale of "every single Android phone on the planet", the left over after "the majority of phone that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature" still leaves a huge number of devices. I suspect even something stupidly simple like "What's the p99 low temperature of all the Android temp reports in a suburb?" might be a really good indicator, when "all the Android phones in a suburb" might be 10,000 devices or more?
>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.
It kinda was, but they did this same rugpull and closed their free api way back before covid.
They do still claim:
"250,000+ Weather Stations
Weather Underground is a global community of people connecting data from environmental sensors like weather stations and air quality monitors "
I think it's a bit like FlightRadar24 - if you feed them your weather station (or ADBS receiver) data you get some level of free access but with non commercial use restrictions.
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.
I never considered government weather departments would provide APIs for their data, but after seeing your comment I went to see if Environment Canada provided one.
I am very impressed by how how much data they provide free of charge.
Michael Lewis' book the fifth risk talks explicitly how someone with a paid weather app was put in charge of the commerce department (by trump) so he could try to hide public weather data but use it in his app then charge for it.
> 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 would say it's more like saying that driving on the highway is free because you pay taxes. I doubt anyone is buying a developer account specifically for weather API calls.
Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.
It's free like riding the monorail at Disney World is free; included in the cost of your entry ticket, and utterly inaccessible to anyone who has not paid.
> Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.
Highways are mostly funded through gas taxes, and registration fees for EVs. Even foreign tourists buy gasoline, or drive an EV that paid its registration fee.
Also, the Disney World monorail is outside the ticket gates. You can ride it without a ticket.
Foreign tourists very much pay for driving on the highways on the way to Disney World through higher sales taxes, tolls, hotel taxes etc. There is a reason that Florida is state tax free.
Source: I live 30 minutes away from Disney and partially moved to Florida when I started working remotely to save money on taxes.
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 you scroll down on to the bottom of Apple Weather it has a “Report an Issue” button which allows you to report current weather conditions at your location.
I have no idea what happens to that data and if it contributes to the report in any way.
Wow I would have assumed that was to report a bug not a weather call. Darksky had a great ui for quickly reporting the weather and encouraged it as the primary feature of the app.
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.
You're not wrong, but their idiotic ideas having catastrophic effects hasn't stopped them doing anything yet. Probably because none of them have a clue what they're doing.
The billionaire class are bilking the country for every cent its worth, and when everything finally crumbles they will move to the next country with a stable middle class and start the process all over again.
They do not care about these consequences because they have enough resources at their disposal to protect themselves while everyone else suffers.
That is one possibility. Another is that many people truly believe in the religion whose mantra is "all government is bad, and the market always knows best."
This was once convenient propaganda for those who wanted lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses. Now the propaganda has been repeated for so long that many have forgotten it was propaganda, and believe that it is actually true.
As I grow older, it gets easier for me to accept that most often the world is not a vast organized conspiracy, it's just really stupid. Though in current times, it does appear to be both of those things at once.
I know there are people who genuinely believe that, but it would be naive to think that is 100% organic and isn't something corporations and the super-wealthy are holding a megaphone up to because it just so happens to suit their interests.
That's open to interpretation; Obviously, someone has a clue since it's part of a plan. It may just be that the people who have no clue are put there to make following the plan easier.
Just because they have a plan, doesn’t mean they have a clue. Their reasoning for this could be as simple as “government bad”.
Just look at the wild abandon with which DOGE has gone about its cuts. They literally fired the experts who inspect our nuclear arsenal, then had to scramble to hire them back because you know.. it’s literally nuclear bombs we’re talking about.
They have caused a lot of mayhem for federal employees. They have suppressed a ton of information and research. They have kept a significant amount of the public in the dark about their actions.
Yeah, they have done things we would both deem as "dumb" but their internal motive is what decides whether or not they have a clue. Furthering our motives has nothing to do with that.
The amount of fearmongering and scaremongering in this thread is literally off the charts.
No, the weather service isn't being shut down... one private organization decides to charge for API access (you know, to make money) and immediately you folks go straight into sabotage and end-of-the-world conspiracy theories.
It took me all of 3 seconds to find several mentions to the big ooga-booga, "project 2025". The article is literally about a private organization and you folks go right into the conspiracies... it's exhausting.
At this point, I think I have to assume some of you actually enjoy being afraid. Some sort of coping mechanism for losing an election and not getting your way for 4 years...
Accuweather spent a lot of money lobbying to charge for NWS data years ago. It’s not exactly a secret or a conspiracy to assume they wouldn’t like to replace free weather data with their own subscriptions.
So what does a private organization deciding to charge for their own API access have to do with the government???
Get your weather data from NWS if you want... serving an API to anyone/everyone costs money, and AccuWeather apparently decided enough was enough. AccuWeather has no obligation to give you free resources. Same as Reddit, same as Twitter, same as so many companies before them.
Oh no, that's right. It must be a conspiracy to end the world!
Here's the actual NWS API[1], you know... the free one that's not going away nor is charging for access.
Not true, there’s been a huge jump in deportation of people with no criminal record. You’re right though there has been only a marginal increase in deportations specifically of criminals.
Just because there can be MORE deportations and MORE tariffs doesn’t mean he’s not doing them lol. You’ve done a fine job of revealing your motivated reasoning anyhow. Clearly one shouldn’t take your predictions on NWS seriously.
So, you missed the part where "project 2025" is about the government ending access to this information?
And that this "private organization" is one of the supporters of "project 2025"?
This is not hidden. This is happening in public. And yes, the worst hasn't happened yet -- the government removing access to data that has long been free -- but if it does, would you agree that it is a bad thing?
If you think that the government should indeed do that, then this isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just saying out loud that this is a thing you're encouraging the government to do. If you think the government should not do that, then you should consider the evidence that it is in fact happening.
> AccuWeather Chief Executive Officer Steven R. Smith said “AccuWeather does not agree with the view, and AccuWeather has not suggested, that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations. The authors of ‘Project 2025’ used us as an example of forecasts and warnings provided by private sector companies without the knowledge or permission of AccuWeather.”
Project 2025 is fundamentally a propaganda organization which has a symbiotic relationship with both the right- (through populism) and left- (through fear-selling) wing media (social and traditional). You should be immediately critical of anything said by or about them (and fact-check it), because a lot of it is reported uncritically and does not actual represent reality.
Aren't the problems you point to just business justification for companies offering this service for a fee rather than subsidizing the fees with federal debt?
Yes, of course. We're all reasonable adults who are capable of acknowledging that services of value cost money.
It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.
On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.
I've seen this repeated many times but I have yet to see anyone mention, by name, which paid weather service is selling a feed with the same level of service and coverage as the NWS/NOAA. Anyone?
Only NWS has a vast network of sensors: river gauges (with USGS), doppler radars, satellites, airport AOS automated observation systems, etc etc. to support the mission.
Most of the privates are just repackaging their feeds and data. So if you kill NOAA they will have to start almost from scratch.
Well you're describing the chicken and egg problem. If there is high demand for this data a company would fill that niche, but they would have no reason to until the free data is gone.
I also think this chain of comments is a bit off the rails of my original point (maybe my fault). It honestly doesn't matter if there is pain to be felt by removing government services, we spend entirely too much money and any solution to that will hurt.
If we are only willing to remove spending that hurts little to no one we might as well throw in the towel already, we'll never cut spending with that as a gate.
In my experience, having used several paid weather APIs for hobby crap, the NWS ones are generally the worst in every way.
They're slower, harder to query, the documentation is worse, and they have less data available because the others buy data from private weather stations and re bundle it in addition to pre processing and repackaging the Federal data into better formats on your behalf
I say this as a NOAA lover; the government just isn't good at building APIs.
Companies can and do offer data for a fee. In the same way that private toll road existing doesn't mean we should get rid of the highway system, a paid option doesn't mean the government should stop providing a publicly funded option given the immense value it provides to society
If the government option successfully creates a government monopoly, maybe we should?
In this case we simply don't know what the market needs or market value of these services are because no one is incentivized to compete with the subsidized government program.
How have they created a monopoly? This comment is on a post about a company that charges for this data, not to mention competitors like foreca or the weather company
I've noticed this user has a habit of asking these "questions" and then suddenly falling quiet when pressed more closely. (I think they are concern trolling)
If it's a public service or public data, it should be subsidized by the government.
Every American has an interest in seeing the weather for no cost. It's vital to business and recreation, not to mention safety. It absolutely makes sense for us to all pay a tiny amount.
If weather info is that valuable to so many private interests, wouldn't the public get a better deal by insisting that private interests pay market prices (to the public service provider) for that info?
We commonly assume that a publicly owned service serves the public good by giving away the service for free, but this assumes the public's only role is as passive consumer, whose sole interest is seeing the price as low as possible, if not $0
However the public is also the owner and as owners of the service, we are arguably being taking advantage of by private interests who take the free data, only to turn around and create private value with it.
Maybe the public would get a better deal fiscally.
Would having to change APIs every 17 months as providers change their terms, constantly having to deal with breaking changes, etc, etc, etc be a "better deal"? There's an advantage in stability, and that's one thing governments typically provide. Yes, you can argue "a private provider could provide stability... for a fee". Which works great until it turns out even the fee isn't enough to keep them around. And you have to switch providers. Again.
Like roads, parks, postal service, police, fire fighting, education, sewers, etc., the government is allowed to provide public goods. We don't have to live in a Libertarian dystopia.
We do pay for these services. Both as individuals and as organizations. It's called taxes. And those taxes are set by congress, people we elect to represent us. And congress also determines how those taxes will be spent. In this case, we've been collecting and spending taxes on delivering critical weather information and maintaining critical weather monitoring apparatus. Because commerce, safety, etc rely on that information.
Can you imagine how things might be different if there was an additional group of people involved whose only goal is to siphon money out? Capitalism is predicated on the idea that the goal is to charge the most and deliver the least. In this case doing that would mean delays at best and death at worst. Weather is dangerous.
If weather info is that valuable to so many private interests, wouldn't the public get a better deal by insisting that private interests pay market prices (to the public service provider) for that info?
There are plenty of private weather companies, and many private companies employ their own meteorologists and massive computers to generate their own forecasts. (Think agriculture, logistics, aviation, oil exploration.)
Not every company can afford a supercomputer. The NWS forecasts and data are valuable to every other person and company.
Also, the addition of NWS data makes everyone's weather forecasts better. Note how television hurricane forecasts don't show one model, but many models from many sources. All this again is in the interest of commerce, which drives tax revenue.
Compare and contrast the American and the British weather services.
In the USA it was the case that, if the taxpayer paid for it, then it was free. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Thatcher government decided that it would be best if government agencies earned their keep. As a consequence, in the UK, weather data became chargeable. This meant that there was no growth of third party applications that built on Met Office data.
This became a market distortion with TV weather, where the BBC had their data from the Met Office whereas ITV had to use American data, with a specialist broadcaster - The Weather Department - providing the video inserts. The Weather Department eventually came into competition with the Met Office providing their own video inserts, so the marketplace was uncompetitive yet 'competitive'.
Compare with the BBC online news, which does not have to pay for itself in the same way that the mainstream news organisations such as The Guardian, The Telegraph et al. have to either go for paywalls or a smorgasbord of adverts. It is essentially impossible to compete against the BBC for news eyeballs online in the UK due to this competition model.
With weather you need two independent supercomputer outfits that crunch the numbers and come up with forecast data. Why two (or more)? Because forecast models can be wrong in ways that human forecasters can understand and work with. If there are two 'sources of truth' then you can use your gut to go with which one feels right.
Vast supercomputer outfits cost lots of money and, until recently, only a government of considerable size could pay for such an investment. The investment isn't just in the computers, you need a constant stream of meteorologists that can work with the data, so that means one or more universities with the specialism. In the UK we have Reading, that is the best place to go to if you want to get into forecasting, for TV, the military, farming or aviation.
Free weather data is a public good and also 'soft power'. In Ireland they don't have their own weather supercomputers or universities that are renowned for producing expert weather forecasters, hence they need British or American help.
I also forgot the satellites, which is in another league of expense, but necessary for all kinds of observation data.
Observations are interesting as the reliance has historically been on airfields. We missed a chance to get mobile phone base stations reporting in to have vastly more data. Given the amount of money involved in mobile, when the governments sold off the spectrum they could have used the opportunity to insist on weather observation data being collected, in order to refine the model.
Sometimes you get a town next to a lake with a massive mountain behind it where the forecast will consistently be wrong due to how the modelling works and a lack of observation data to make corrections. There are many scenarios such as this and the mobile phone masts could have been used to fill the gaps.
If the UK provided free data (and the USA didn't) then we wouldn't talking about AccuWeather, it would be some British company that the world would be relying on for their apps. This British company would be modest in size but still providing good jobs and keeping graduates from Reading employed. In turn they would be working with people developing specialist apps, for example, weather for race courses and there would be much tax paid to government to make it worth their while, plus national prestige in having 'the best weather service' going.
Another example of a British mistake is the Ordnance Survey, purveyor of paid for maps. Nobody uses Ordnance Survey, it is always Google Maps, Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap. They get pennies from developers and architects that need the official Ordnance Survey maps but nothing from day to day usage, in effect they have lost out.
All these things need to be for the public good, paid for out of public taxation and a genuine free market of private enterprise fostered, otherwise nothing happens.
Thanks for that, I just checked out their free tiers and there is enough there to get started with. This is very much for hobby or development purposes, which is fine.
Imaginably I might want to write an app that needs weather data at scale, even for a simple thing. Imagine I sold chocolate teapots online and, in the delivery notes, wanted to advise customers to not leave their deliveries outside for too long if it was going to be sunny in their postcode area on the day of delivery. The free tier might work.
If it was something more popular, for example milk or veg boxes, then I would need to start paying. This would be for a marginal value but of wording in a delivery note, but something that might differentiate the service.
Or, imagine I sold outdoor gear, with a newsletter that goes out to 100,000 customers. Depending on their postcode I might want to promote deckchairs or umbrellas. Although this level of personalisation isn't going to win any awards for innovation, it is something that could be done, enabling a medium sized company to compete against the big companies that are optimising their promotions for the weather.
There is also the research aspect, to verify a suspected phenomenon against data in an amateur way that you would never get a research grant for.
All considered, I wish they did free with no restrictions.
> “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!
> In the wake of the bill's introduction, Santorum was accused of political impropriety and influence peddling because Joel Myers, the head of Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather and one of Santorum's constituents, was also a Santorum campaign contributor.
In 2017, when Berry Myers (AKA the CEO of AccuWeather) was nominated to head the NOAA, but was never confirmed into the position (due to the series of sexual misconduct at the company), ultimately withdrewing his nomination two years later.
Right now, when Neil Jacobs (long time vocal proponent of comercialising weather data who maintained a social media profile called "The Greatest Hoax" in reference to climate change) and Taylor Jordan (a lobbyist for many weather companies, including AccuWeather of course) got appointed into the position of overseeing NOAA.
Meanwhile China has reached their 2030 goal of peak CO2 emissions 5 years early by rapidly deploying solar/wind/nuclear and manufacturing cheap EVs for personal transport. I wish the US was capable of working towards and achieving large-scale societal goals like that.
We are. Just look at the current administration. What they've accomplished in just 6 months is staggering.
We've just let the wrong sort of people control our communication infrastructure, set the messages disseminated by that infrastructure, and take power in a multi-pronged attack.
There's no reason there couldn't have been an FDR-esque strongman driven emulation of China's approach.
Instead we're blowing up the national debt, cutting services, dismantling soft power, destroying our scientific and academic infrastructure, and expanding the military.
Well, there are varying opinions on that. I agree with you somewhat, but many that "voted for that" have said otherwise and either 1) didn't ever hear about said document or 2) actively dismissed it as "fake news" or 3) believed the president when he said he'd never heard of it and it wouldn't be his agenda.
Trump himself, and his spokespeople, all publicly denied that they had anything to do with Project 2025 ahead of the election. It was a laughable lie, the only people who believed it were apparently the media, who reported it as fact.
We once were. We built canals, a massive railroad system, then our interstate system. Likely a sign of our slow decline to a has been country.
Today we should be building subways, a hub and spoke high speed rail system, and an automated hub and spoke freight system that uses trucks only for first and last mile. And maybe a tunnel at the Bering straight.
None of it even makes any sense. So, our national ability to predict whether it's going to rain this weekend, anywhere in the country, is "climate change alarm?"
They're just evil and want to maximize short term profit with no consideration of side effects or impacts to future trajectories, and their ideas are so stupid and shortsighted they don't even maximize short term profits either.
You're talking about an administration voted in by people who attack meteorologists because they think they cause hurricanes[0], and a President who has called climate change a Chinese hoax.
This is a perfectly rational set of policies as far as these people are concerned. How else are we going to stop the Jewish space lasers?
It's one of those troublesome "reality has a left wing bias" problems. If you let the facts express themselves too much, the gap between truth and propaganda becomes too noticeable. Can't have that.
It's funny that they call it planning for the unplannable when the NWS have given extremely specific instructions on what to do in all sorts of inclement situations. This passage was just baffling.
> "The Pentagon ... announced that we are eliminating woke climate change programs and initiatives inconsistent with our core warfighting mission," [Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell] said.
To them, it’s bad, to us, it’s good. Good and bad are subjective when one side refuses science. You can show them data until you’re blue in the face but they won’t understand it, they won’t listen to reason because they are on a mission to remake the US like their racist grandfathers liked it. All workers report to the floor.
Project 2025 is a comprehensive conservative wish list. It's only scary because of the outrageous items mixed in with all the unremarkable ones that any conservative would put forth. You would expect any conservative, even a "good" one, to knock off a huge portion of the list just by virtue of being conservative; that tells us almost nothing about the likelihood of most of the rest of the list (especially from an administration that has at least claimed to disavow it)
Project 2025 is scary because of what it tells us about the American voters that support it, not because it has some sort of prognosticative power over what the Trump admin will actually do. It's about the Overton Window, not the Oval Office.
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?
First, shutting down programs like this is like leaving the lights off in your home because you can't make rent of the mortgage. Saving $0.025 off your energy bill is not going to meaningfully help.
Second, it’s at the top because it’s a public good of obviously enormous value that a common shmuck can understand.
I guess I'm a common shmuck. What is the public good, and specifically why is it a public good that is so difficult for the free market to provide that the government needs to run and subsidize it?
Accurate, scientific information to make informed decisions that can affect your safety and well-being. If you have to drive over a bridge or close to a body of water every day but you know there is a high chance of flooding tomorrow would you still travel to the same high risk area?
What do you think is the role of government? To improve the lives of its citizens should be up there, do you agree?
The failing was local, because the MAGA morons refused federal funding to install alarm systems because it came from Biden (until, of course, they quietly took it and redirected the funds to the Sheriff department).
The NWS worked perfectly and they were warned in time.
>This is one I don't really understand why the change would be a huge deal in context
This is likely because you don't use the weather reports for anything of value/importance in your daily life - there are other professions / government departments / etc that DO use these reports and require them for safety reasons.
Just for a quick example anyone involved in aviation.
NOAA is a military agency. It is not civilian, like VA, ICE, or Dept of State.
Weather provided realtime marine, atmospheric, and solar weather to better equip theatres of war and aid.
Without weather, soldiers conducting defense, offense, or aid operations have that much less intel on making decisions. The side effect is less climate change and national weather reporting.
If anything, the stripping down soft power, intelligence, science, and everything seems like a plan to turn us into a 3rd world kleptocratic kakistocracy. Then again, capitalism has went from innovation and creation, to extraction and worsening.
Maybe its time to let China take the reins and show what socialism can accomplish. If the videos on Xiao Hong Shu (rednote) are any indication, they're doing absolutely superbly.
NOAA is under the Chamber of Commerce. The military has their own meteorological capabilities from what I understand, though they may also use NOAA data. I don’t know how you mean that NOAA is a military agency, as they are not in the chain of command of any military agency or group.
Even their officers are not armed services, though they do receive a commission. I think you might be thinking of something that I haven’t seen or heard about, so please let me know if I am wrong.
> We should be cutting everything we can to avoid a complete train wreck though, why would this float to the top of the list?
It makes a lot more sense when you consider that certain people think that climate change isn't real while weather science supports the idea that the climate not only can change but is changing, and that humans are the cause of it.
Weather data is incredibly important to a huge number of activities and to the general safety of the public, which is why the government is providing it in the first place. Debt to fund it is almost certain to economically productive. The republican controlled congress is cutting taxes and raising debt levels. A similar argument could be made that we should continue to fund services and raise taxes to reduce deficits instead
Well to start with, I'd ask if its just an easy one to cut - maybe because there are alternatives or it isn't really on the level of a fundamental human right.
Balancing our budget is going to hurt like hell and everyone will bleed. That doesn't mean the answer is to say fuck it and keep racking up debt.
Given the context of the historically largest budget deficit alongside decreased taxes on the wealthiest Americans, it's genuinely hard to believe the goal of this cut is balancing our budget
The problem is this predicted cut and others are a drop in the bucket (for the government). They are a rounding error compared to what’s added to spending with the recent bill.
It isn't just the recent spending bill, we've been racking up debt since Clinton was in office.
While I agree this wouldn't make a meaningful dent in the deficit, every bit helps. Should we instead sit around until there's political will to take on the budget of the DoD, entitlements, and our debt's own interest payments?
How are you continuing to thump this simplistic debt narrative, when it's painfully clear that the actual goals of the current administration are to balloon the debt and to destroy US soft power and stability that encourage people loaning money to our government at lower interest rates?
Surely you can see that if you earnestly want to talk about principled shrinking of our government's debt burden, the first step is to oust the current regime so that such editorial decisions can be made with the intent of helping our country rather than as a movement to destroy us.
The same people who want to cut this service just added a million times that amount to the national debt. Any claim that this is about saving money is transparent bullshit.
Free weather data has massive positive externalities. Just like in so many other areas, this administration is destroying a common good to benefit a handful of private individuals.
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).
Update: this worked; I switched to Open Meteo and brought back the site (also bot protections are on and seem to be blocking some stuff so hopefully that keeps things under the Open Meteo limit.)
- 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.
So true, it is so awesome. I've just replaced my weather network bookmark with the open-meteo's "API Response" chart. I hope open-meteo doesn't mind :)
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.
There is an SWE on the other side of this API - and I imagine they are enjoying a government salary and pension for operating it... people accessing it for free wouldn't impact them.
It is truly remarkable how some of those affluent & resourceful devs in the world come here to complain about an API that now requires a subscription.
Somebody, somewhere in the world has to build & maintain this API. Somebody's job depends on it. If you use it and you find it useful, you can afford to pay whatever they're willing to charge.
Otherwise, build & maintain your own. Make sure you never charge for it!!
Semi off-topic, but does anybody know a good weather radar app that has coverage outside the US (with particular interest in Europe)?
Apple/Dark Sky seems to only cover a very limited number of countries (despite many more providing radar data under open access), and zoom.earth seems to be shutting down precipitation radar by September.
I second windy. Very detailed and precise. Supports several models/data sources like ECMWF, Arome, Meteo Blue etc. They still have a free tier with a 5-day forecast and a very expensive premium tier (10 days, I believe??) - but everything longer than 5 days tends to get increasingly im precise anyways.
My use case is usually evading thunderstorms when cycling/hiking, which are ~impossible to predict more than a few hours ahead of time anyway, so this works perfectly. Thank you!
Enshitification and hyperinflation marches on, powered by the leadership of DOGE.
I used ForecastBar until they went to a rent-only-but-never-own model where a frickin' weather app has tiers. WTF!? Don't get me started on the weather.com apps either.
As @otterly already posted there has, is and will always be weather.gov
As a matter of fact US Commerce department provides many API services including free geolocation (wuuut) via census.gov among so many services
A side note about Trump and politics/shmolitix etc: his stageshow budget cuts will have short term impact but will likely be repaired when the House flips and Dems make gains in the Senate after the mid terms. A lot of White Americans living at or below the poverty line will be hurt by the scheduled cuts and will have questions n' thoughts, but man this Epstein footcannon-nuclear-grenade-launcher of Trump's just might be the thing that ends Republican Party's 10 year abusive relations with an objectively adjudicated and multifacted criminal
The scientists I know have been pretty loud about there being no good way to repair what's been broken. Stuff can't just be turned on again.
I do expect more than just flipping off a switch: at some level there'll be outright sabotage, of data systems or physical hardware or both, for the purposes of destroying what is being made to go away.
This is because that's why it's being done. Budget concerns were never the point. It's the wholesale destruction of American soft power and indispensable systems. That's why I expect physical sabotage under cover of 'decommissioning'.
Have you not been paying attention for the past several decades? Trump is unprecedented in audacity, crassness, and degree of harm. But the overall trend is right in line with what Republicans have been doing for thirty+ years (at least as long as I've been paying attention). And no, the destruction does not cause people to vote Democrat in response. People become more desperate, more reactionary, more quick to blame their fellow citizens, and more easy to lead towards supporting even more destruction - this is exactly how we've arrived at Trump in the first place. When the Democrats do get back in office, they effectively act as controlled opposition. Even if they try to undo the damage, most actions are sabotaged by a few "moderates" that have been captured by the corpos just like the Republicans. And then the Republican machine goes to work projecting - pointing to the Democrats' failings as open corruption, inability to do anything, fiscal irresponsibility as price inflation finally appears from the Republicans' profligate spending, etc.
Personally I'm not really worried about the "no more elections" panic narrative, because I think the real answer is that there isn't going to be much of a federal government left to take the reigns of.
White Americans have been self-sabotaging for 150 years and it is fine with them, they are completely happy with this situation as long as Black Americans are harmed at least as much. This is the only motivating reason behind about a third of the American electorate.
I imagine there is a lot of new pressure on public APIs now that there’s an explosion of vibe coded projects accessing them (some probably quite haphazardly).
Uhm, having a weather api is probably the easiest thing to implement because of how catchable it is. Any public api accidental can be prevented by tiered rate-limiting:
- uber low limits for anon access
- low, but reasonable for register free users
- Up-to-you for paid users
You might say: well, proxies are cheaper than paid plan, and solution to that - charge reasonable price.
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.
Blockchains have clearance rates that are a few dozen orders of magnitude too slow for this. Bitcoin for example clears 7 transactions per second.
While that detail is true, the real problem is much more general: you have goal x, you use some proxy y for that goal, you pay people for y, they give you lots of y that may end up being the exact opposite of x.
Famously, the British found x was "fewer cobras" and y was "cobra tails", the opposite of x being "the locals bred cobras to get money for cobra tails".
Make a citizen science weather station that's free, it's all fine. Make it paid, someone's going to grab satellite pics and generate from them plausible but not necessarily accurate simulated weather station data for everywhere to get that money.
Incentives do work in general. Sometimes they are abused. Incentives with no checks and balances are always abused. I don’t think the generalized problem you discuss above is broadly general
Incentives can work, but most governments and businesses are still only mediocre at them even with enough money to throw at the problem they get to do do-overs when they get it wrong.
Trying to do this with humans on a big scale combines the worst of software development in the days of punched cards, working without anyone having given you a formal language spec, and black-hat hackers on the modern internet.
It is very very easy to pick your incentives badly; you only get feedback on a very slow cycle (in the punched card days you might run the program overnight and only find it crashed on line 32 from a typo the next morning, but it's much slower than that in meatspace); and you also need constant fine-tuning as people interested in gaming the system share their methods for doing so.
Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput. I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes: https://www.helium.com/
It doesn’t work as well as they wanted and it has been subject to various exploits over the years from people figuring out how to fake the participation to extract rewards.
>Bitcoin wasn’t designed for high throughput
>>Commerce on the Internet has come to rely almost exclusively on financial institutions serving as trusted third parties to process electronic payments. While the system works well enough for most transactions, it still suffers from the inherent weaknesses of the trust based model. Completely non-reversible transactions are not really possible, since financial institutions cannot avoid mediating disputes. The cost of mediation increases transaction costs, limiting the minimum practical transaction size and cutting off the possibility for small casual transactions
From the bitcoin white paper.
>I’m referring to projects like the Helium network, which rewards people for running network nodes
OK, what's the clearance rate for helium?
Visa clears 35,000 a second.
TON blockchain showed throughput above 100k per second, about 3x more of visa. There are other blockchains with similar throughput claims. L2 networks can give even lower fees and higher throughput.
I don't think they were saying to use blockchain to do this. It's just an example that shows that if you offer financial incentives in exchange for data people will exploit it and gameify it. The reason blockchain clearance rates are so slow is because of all the effort to prevent this. You could remove PoW from bitcoin and the network would be significantly faster. It would also be dominated by people exploiting it.
It's the same thing with ad networks, most of the effort goes into verifying that an ad click was legitimate and not a bot. Or that classic story of when the British government tried to eliminate Cobras in India by paying a bounty for every dead cobra, which just led to people breeding more cobras.
Time series database comes in ding ding
Yeah I could see the hobby-drive there
Many people have no problem setting up a station and giving away the data for free.
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.
You’ve just described Ambient Weather. What I find kinda funny about that is they still try to upsell you to get more than 1 year of data retention.
Luckily, they allow you to configure additional arbitrary locations to pump data to. I wrote a little program to drop that data into an InfluxDB database (along with PurpleAir, AirGradient, AirThings, Solar Data, and Iotawatt). The only practical use I’ve found is to look and see “When was the last time we head three days in a row that were so windy?” I suppose I could do fun stuff with Home Assistant too.
You need to collect data and run the weather models, which for good ones could require a lot of continuous compute resources.
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.)
Is there a feasible way to turn noisy cell phone temperature data into reliable weather data? Cell phones can be indoors; they can be in someone's pocket next to their body heat; they can be in direct sunlight; and they can generate a lot of heat themselves under load. And it's not just outlier phones that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature; it's probably the majority of phones at any given time.
Probably not?
But I barely understand how shit works when you operate at Google scale.
I wonder how many "Android-ish" devices like maybe in car entertainment systems are out there and reporting all their telemetry data back to Google? I wonder how much "Android" is in vehicles with AndroidAuto, and whether that hardware typically has temperature and pressure sensors like phones do?
If I had, say, a billion cars sending me data that includes temp, location, and possibly some vehicle specific CANBUS type data - I'd guess there could possibly be a signal in there that could reliably report temps and pressures at locations, based on heuristics that identify cars parked outdoors.
Same with phones. At the scale of "every single Android phone on the planet", the left over after "the majority of phone that aren't in a position to accurately measure outdoor temperature" still leaves a huge number of devices. I suspect even something stupidly simple like "What's the p99 low temperature of all the Android temp reports in a suburb?" might be a really good indicator, when "all the Android phones in a suburb" might be 10,000 devices or more?
> Wonder if there's a model where people could make money/not game the system too.
We're up against the most basic of human nature here.
>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.
People pay to have a tempest weather station
https://tempest.earth/tempest-home-weather-system/
That's pretty cool, thank you for sharing.
Do you have any idea if you can plug this thing into a public api to share?
https://community.home-assistant.io/t/weatherflow-tempest-wh...
Looks like it can be done with home assistant and then pushed up to collection locations, so I suspect things are pretty open
Same deal for Ecowitt: https://www.ecowitt.net/ (sign up required)
I can access any other publicly shared Ecowitt station's data.
interesting design, doesn't have the cliche anemometer spoons
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).
https://www.adsbexchange.com/how-it-works/
https://www.flightaware.com/adsb/
https://www.birdweather.com/about
https://ebird.org/about
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.
Isn't that Weather Underground's schtick?
It kinda was, but they did this same rugpull and closed their free api way back before covid.
They do still claim:
"250,000+ Weather Stations
Weather Underground is a global community of people connecting data from environmental sensors like weather stations and air quality monitors "
I think it's a bit like FlightRadar24 - if you feed them your weather station (or ADBS receiver) data you get some level of free access but with non commercial use restrictions.
It's a reasonable tradeoff --- if I had a larger lot, and if there weren't already a bunch of stations in my neighborhood I'd gladly set one up.
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.
Aren’t all these services just abrogating some national weather service data? Is that api exposed to the public?
Yes, and it's a free public service as I would expect. https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
I never considered government weather departments would provide APIs for their data, but after seeing your comment I went to see if Environment Canada provided one.
I am very impressed by how how much data they provide free of charge.
https://api.weather.gc.ca/
They do even better: https://eccc-msc.github.io/open-data/readme_en/
For now. A component of Project 2025 is to remove the public access.
Michael Lewis' book the fifth risk talks explicitly how someone with a paid weather app was put in charge of the commerce department (by trump) so he could try to hide public weather data but use it in his app then charge for it.
It's almost as if APIs cost money to run?!
Dark Sky was never free for unlimited use.
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.
> 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 would say it's more like saying that driving on the highway is free because you pay taxes. I doubt anyone is buying a developer account specifically for weather API calls.
Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.
It's free like riding the monorail at Disney World is free; included in the cost of your entry ticket, and utterly inaccessible to anyone who has not paid.
> Lots of people drive on highways who pay no highway taxes, foreign tourists for example.
Highways are mostly funded through gas taxes, and registration fees for EVs. Even foreign tourists buy gasoline, or drive an EV that paid its registration fee.
Also, the Disney World monorail is outside the ticket gates. You can ride it without a ticket.
OK fine pick some random thing that's "free" within the ticket gates but isn't what people go there for.
Foreign tourists very much pay for driving on the highways on the way to Disney World through higher sales taxes, tolls, hotel taxes etc. There is a reason that Florida is state tax free.
Source: I live 30 minutes away from Disney and partially moved to Florida when I started working remotely to save money on taxes.
Lots of people get the weather forecasts from tv or radio for free. Weather forecasts aren't "utterly inaccessible" the way the Disney monorail is.
Not from the Dark Sky API they don't.
We're not talking about "weather forecasts", we're talking about a specific set of weather forecasts accessed in a particular way.
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 you scroll down on to the bottom of Apple Weather it has a “Report an Issue” button which allows you to report current weather conditions at your location.
I have no idea what happens to that data and if it contributes to the report in any way.
Wow I would have assumed that was to report a bug not a weather call. Darksky had a great ui for quickly reporting the weather and encouraged it as the primary feature of the app.
There actually is.
At the bottom - report an issue.
NWS's APIs are still free of charge: https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
For now. There's a pretty decent chance that AccuWeather is discontinuing this in anticipation that the NWS is going to be sabotaged.
Update: https://gizmodo.com/republicans-project-2025-would-end-free-...
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.
It's another attack from within.
> It's another attack from within.
So, Wednesday?
Yup. I concur, it'll be because they expect sabotage.
You're not wrong, but their idiotic ideas having catastrophic effects hasn't stopped them doing anything yet. Probably because none of them have a clue what they're doing.
They know exactly what they're doing.
The billionaire class are bilking the country for every cent its worth, and when everything finally crumbles they will move to the next country with a stable middle class and start the process all over again.
They do not care about these consequences because they have enough resources at their disposal to protect themselves while everyone else suffers.
Leveraged buying/private equity play at the scale of the nation state.
That is one possibility. Another is that many people truly believe in the religion whose mantra is "all government is bad, and the market always knows best."
This was once convenient propaganda for those who wanted lower taxes and less regulation of their businesses. Now the propaganda has been repeated for so long that many have forgotten it was propaganda, and believe that it is actually true.
As I grow older, it gets easier for me to accept that most often the world is not a vast organized conspiracy, it's just really stupid. Though in current times, it does appear to be both of those things at once.
I know there are people who genuinely believe that, but it would be naive to think that is 100% organic and isn't something corporations and the super-wealthy are holding a megaphone up to because it just so happens to suit their interests.
I was mostly thinking... the super-wealthy are the ones who forgot that it was just propaganda, and started to really believe it.
That's open to interpretation; Obviously, someone has a clue since it's part of a plan. It may just be that the people who have no clue are put there to make following the plan easier.
Just because they have a plan, doesn’t mean they have a clue. Their reasoning for this could be as simple as “government bad”.
Just look at the wild abandon with which DOGE has gone about its cuts. They literally fired the experts who inspect our nuclear arsenal, then had to scramble to hire them back because you know.. it’s literally nuclear bombs we’re talking about.
They have caused a lot of mayhem for federal employees. They have suppressed a ton of information and research. They have kept a significant amount of the public in the dark about their actions.
Yeah, they have done things we would both deem as "dumb" but their internal motive is what decides whether or not they have a clue. Furthering our motives has nothing to do with that.
If the plan is “break things” it does not imply any underlying of understanding, both of the things in question or even how to effectively break them
> It's another attack from within.
The amount of fearmongering and scaremongering in this thread is literally off the charts.
No, the weather service isn't being shut down... one private organization decides to charge for API access (you know, to make money) and immediately you folks go straight into sabotage and end-of-the-world conspiracy theories.
It took me all of 3 seconds to find several mentions to the big ooga-booga, "project 2025". The article is literally about a private organization and you folks go right into the conspiracies... it's exhausting.
At this point, I think I have to assume some of you actually enjoy being afraid. Some sort of coping mechanism for losing an election and not getting your way for 4 years...
Accuweather spent a lot of money lobbying to charge for NWS data years ago. It’s not exactly a secret or a conspiracy to assume they wouldn’t like to replace free weather data with their own subscriptions.
So what does a private organization deciding to charge for their own API access have to do with the government???
Get your weather data from NWS if you want... serving an API to anyone/everyone costs money, and AccuWeather apparently decided enough was enough. AccuWeather has no obligation to give you free resources. Same as Reddit, same as Twitter, same as so many companies before them.
Oh no, that's right. It must be a conspiracy to end the world!
Here's the actual NWS API[1], you know... the free one that's not going away nor is charging for access.
[1] https://www.weather.gov/documentation/services-web-api
6 months ago were you saying "there's no way he'll do broad tariffs" or "there's no way he'll do a mass deportation campaign?"
How many tariffs have been realized? Very few...
Deporting known criminals and gang affiliates isn't a "mass deportation campaign".
Don't allow your flavor of politics to cloud your world view.
And... you've interpreted my writings incorrectly. I've been hoping for reciprocal tariffs most of my life...
Not true, there’s been a huge jump in deportation of people with no criminal record. You’re right though there has been only a marginal increase in deportations specifically of criminals.
https://www.cato.org/blog/65-people-taken-ice-had-no-convict...
The effective tariff rate on American consumers is above 20%…
https://budgetlab.yale.edu/research/state-us-tariffs-july-23...
Just because there can be MORE deportations and MORE tariffs doesn’t mean he’s not doing them lol. You’ve done a fine job of revealing your motivated reasoning anyhow. Clearly one shouldn’t take your predictions on NWS seriously.
> the free one that's not going away nor is charging for access.
Care to make a wager? I'll gladly/sadly wager $100 with some broker that the NWS weather data will no longer be freely available by July 1 2026.
So, you missed the part where "project 2025" is about the government ending access to this information?
And that this "private organization" is one of the supporters of "project 2025"?
This is not hidden. This is happening in public. And yes, the worst hasn't happened yet -- the government removing access to data that has long been free -- but if it does, would you agree that it is a bad thing?
If you think that the government should indeed do that, then this isn't a conspiracy theory; it's just saying out loud that this is a thing you're encouraging the government to do. If you think the government should not do that, then you should consider the evidence that it is in fact happening.
> this "private organization" is one of the supporters of "project 2025"
This was misinformation on the part of project 2025.
https://www.accuweather.com/en/press/accuweather-does-not-su...
> AccuWeather Chief Executive Officer Steven R. Smith said “AccuWeather does not agree with the view, and AccuWeather has not suggested, that the National Weather Service (NWS) should fully commercialize its operations. The authors of ‘Project 2025’ used us as an example of forecasts and warnings provided by private sector companies without the knowledge or permission of AccuWeather.”
Project 2025 is fundamentally a propaganda organization which has a symbiotic relationship with both the right- (through populism) and left- (through fear-selling) wing media (social and traditional). You should be immediately critical of anything said by or about them (and fact-check it), because a lot of it is reported uncritically and does not actual represent reality.
> This is not hidden. This is happening in public.
Yes, a private organization has decided to charge for access to their resources, aka their API.
What on earth does that have to do with the government and this boogey-man "project 2025"???
Step off your soap box for a moment and contemplate what you are saying. It's lunacy at it's finest...
Was it "project 2025" that made Reddit charge for their API access? What about Twitter? Booga-booga!
Aren't the problems you point to just business justification for companies offering this service for a fee rather than subsidizing the fees with federal debt?
Yes, of course. We're all reasonable adults who are capable of acknowledging that services of value cost money.
It just so happens that weather is a phenomenon which affects all people and requires large, distributed, passive infrastructure to effectively manage. It's a classic case where the public option is bound to be more efficient in terms of absolute resource allocation.
On what basis do I assert that it's "bound" to be more efficient? Simple: weather affects the production, transportation, and logistics of virtually all goods. The costs of weather are therefore distributed equally across society regardless of government policy. Government is very good at delivering this specific type of centralized basic infrastructure in a cost-effective way (see also: roads), so if we're all paying for it together regardless this is a no-brainer policy.
I've seen this repeated many times but I have yet to see anyone mention, by name, which paid weather service is selling a feed with the same level of service and coverage as the NWS/NOAA. Anyone?
Only NWS has a vast network of sensors: river gauges (with USGS), doppler radars, satellites, airport AOS automated observation systems, etc etc. to support the mission.
Most of the privates are just repackaging their feeds and data. So if you kill NOAA they will have to start almost from scratch.
Well you're describing the chicken and egg problem. If there is high demand for this data a company would fill that niche, but they would have no reason to until the free data is gone.
I also think this chain of comments is a bit off the rails of my original point (maybe my fault). It honestly doesn't matter if there is pain to be felt by removing government services, we spend entirely too much money and any solution to that will hurt.
If we are only willing to remove spending that hurts little to no one we might as well throw in the towel already, we'll never cut spending with that as a gate.
In my experience, having used several paid weather APIs for hobby crap, the NWS ones are generally the worst in every way.
They're slower, harder to query, the documentation is worse, and they have less data available because the others buy data from private weather stations and re bundle it in addition to pre processing and repackaging the Federal data into better formats on your behalf
I say this as a NOAA lover; the government just isn't good at building APIs.
Companies can and do offer data for a fee. In the same way that private toll road existing doesn't mean we should get rid of the highway system, a paid option doesn't mean the government should stop providing a publicly funded option given the immense value it provides to society
If the government option successfully creates a government monopoly, maybe we should?
In this case we simply don't know what the market needs or market value of these services are because no one is incentivized to compete with the subsidized government program.
How have they created a monopoly? This comment is on a post about a company that charges for this data, not to mention competitors like foreca or the weather company
I've noticed this user has a habit of asking these "questions" and then suddenly falling quiet when pressed more closely. (I think they are concern trolling)
If it's a public service or public data, it should be subsidized by the government.
Every American has an interest in seeing the weather for no cost. It's vital to business and recreation, not to mention safety. It absolutely makes sense for us to all pay a tiny amount.
No
If weather info is that valuable to so many private interests, wouldn't the public get a better deal by insisting that private interests pay market prices (to the public service provider) for that info?
We commonly assume that a publicly owned service serves the public good by giving away the service for free, but this assumes the public's only role is as passive consumer, whose sole interest is seeing the price as low as possible, if not $0
However the public is also the owner and as owners of the service, we are arguably being taking advantage of by private interests who take the free data, only to turn around and create private value with it.
Maybe the public would get a better deal fiscally.
Would having to change APIs every 17 months as providers change their terms, constantly having to deal with breaking changes, etc, etc, etc be a "better deal"? There's an advantage in stability, and that's one thing governments typically provide. Yes, you can argue "a private provider could provide stability... for a fee". Which works great until it turns out even the fee isn't enough to keep them around. And you have to switch providers. Again.
Like roads, parks, postal service, police, fire fighting, education, sewers, etc., the government is allowed to provide public goods. We don't have to live in a Libertarian dystopia.
We do pay for these services. Both as individuals and as organizations. It's called taxes. And those taxes are set by congress, people we elect to represent us. And congress also determines how those taxes will be spent. In this case, we've been collecting and spending taxes on delivering critical weather information and maintaining critical weather monitoring apparatus. Because commerce, safety, etc rely on that information.
Can you imagine how things might be different if there was an additional group of people involved whose only goal is to siphon money out? Capitalism is predicated on the idea that the goal is to charge the most and deliver the least. In this case doing that would mean delays at best and death at worst. Weather is dangerous.
If weather info is that valuable to so many private interests, wouldn't the public get a better deal by insisting that private interests pay market prices (to the public service provider) for that info?
There are plenty of private weather companies, and many private companies employ their own meteorologists and massive computers to generate their own forecasts. (Think agriculture, logistics, aviation, oil exploration.)
Not every company can afford a supercomputer. The NWS forecasts and data are valuable to every other person and company.
Also, the addition of NWS data makes everyone's weather forecasts better. Note how television hurricane forecasts don't show one model, but many models from many sources. All this again is in the interest of commerce, which drives tax revenue.
I mean, there's a relatively famous mechanism for garnering a portion of all private value produced by such a thing.
I know, I know! ... is it tariffs? Because then China and Mexico will pay them!
Compare and contrast the American and the British weather services.
In the USA it was the case that, if the taxpayer paid for it, then it was free. Meanwhile, in the UK, the Thatcher government decided that it would be best if government agencies earned their keep. As a consequence, in the UK, weather data became chargeable. This meant that there was no growth of third party applications that built on Met Office data.
This became a market distortion with TV weather, where the BBC had their data from the Met Office whereas ITV had to use American data, with a specialist broadcaster - The Weather Department - providing the video inserts. The Weather Department eventually came into competition with the Met Office providing their own video inserts, so the marketplace was uncompetitive yet 'competitive'.
Compare with the BBC online news, which does not have to pay for itself in the same way that the mainstream news organisations such as The Guardian, The Telegraph et al. have to either go for paywalls or a smorgasbord of adverts. It is essentially impossible to compete against the BBC for news eyeballs online in the UK due to this competition model.
With weather you need two independent supercomputer outfits that crunch the numbers and come up with forecast data. Why two (or more)? Because forecast models can be wrong in ways that human forecasters can understand and work with. If there are two 'sources of truth' then you can use your gut to go with which one feels right.
Vast supercomputer outfits cost lots of money and, until recently, only a government of considerable size could pay for such an investment. The investment isn't just in the computers, you need a constant stream of meteorologists that can work with the data, so that means one or more universities with the specialism. In the UK we have Reading, that is the best place to go to if you want to get into forecasting, for TV, the military, farming or aviation.
Free weather data is a public good and also 'soft power'. In Ireland they don't have their own weather supercomputers or universities that are renowned for producing expert weather forecasters, hence they need British or American help.
I also forgot the satellites, which is in another league of expense, but necessary for all kinds of observation data.
Observations are interesting as the reliance has historically been on airfields. We missed a chance to get mobile phone base stations reporting in to have vastly more data. Given the amount of money involved in mobile, when the governments sold off the spectrum they could have used the opportunity to insist on weather observation data being collected, in order to refine the model.
Sometimes you get a town next to a lake with a massive mountain behind it where the forecast will consistently be wrong due to how the modelling works and a lack of observation data to make corrections. There are many scenarios such as this and the mobile phone masts could have been used to fill the gaps.
If the UK provided free data (and the USA didn't) then we wouldn't talking about AccuWeather, it would be some British company that the world would be relying on for their apps. This British company would be modest in size but still providing good jobs and keeping graduates from Reading employed. In turn they would be working with people developing specialist apps, for example, weather for race courses and there would be much tax paid to government to make it worth their while, plus national prestige in having 'the best weather service' going.
Another example of a British mistake is the Ordnance Survey, purveyor of paid for maps. Nobody uses Ordnance Survey, it is always Google Maps, Apple Maps or OpenStreetMap. They get pennies from developers and architects that need the official Ordnance Survey maps but nothing from day to day usage, in effect they have lost out.
All these things need to be for the public good, paid for out of public taxation and a genuine free market of private enterprise fostered, otherwise nothing happens.
Met office weather data has a free tier, an API with a limit of 380 calls per day.
Thanks for that, I just checked out their free tiers and there is enough there to get started with. This is very much for hobby or development purposes, which is fine.
Imaginably I might want to write an app that needs weather data at scale, even for a simple thing. Imagine I sold chocolate teapots online and, in the delivery notes, wanted to advise customers to not leave their deliveries outside for too long if it was going to be sunny in their postcode area on the day of delivery. The free tier might work.
If it was something more popular, for example milk or veg boxes, then I would need to start paying. This would be for a marginal value but of wording in a delivery note, but something that might differentiate the service.
Or, imagine I sold outdoor gear, with a newsletter that goes out to 100,000 customers. Depending on their postcode I might want to promote deckchairs or umbrellas. Although this level of personalisation isn't going to win any awards for innovation, it is something that could be done, enabling a medium sized company to compete against the big companies that are optimising their promotions for the weather.
There is also the research aspect, to verify a suspected phenomenon against data in an amateur way that you would never get a research grant for.
All considered, I wish they did free with no restrictions.
Exactly. We don’t some socialists telling us about hurricanes. The peasants can’t afford umbrellas anyway.
> “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!
For context, this is something AccuWeather in particular lobbied for for decades. This was their goal in particular.
In 2005: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Weather_Service_Dutie...
> In the wake of the bill's introduction, Santorum was accused of political impropriety and influence peddling because Joel Myers, the head of Pennsylvania-based AccuWeather and one of Santorum's constituents, was also a Santorum campaign contributor.
In 2017, when Berry Myers (AKA the CEO of AccuWeather) was nominated to head the NOAA, but was never confirmed into the position (due to the series of sexual misconduct at the company), ultimately withdrewing his nomination two years later.
Right now, when Neil Jacobs (long time vocal proponent of comercialising weather data who maintained a social media profile called "The Greatest Hoax" in reference to climate change) and Taylor Jordan (a lobbyist for many weather companies, including AccuWeather of course) got appointed into the position of overseeing NOAA.
Meanwhile China has reached their 2030 goal of peak CO2 emissions 5 years early by rapidly deploying solar/wind/nuclear and manufacturing cheap EVs for personal transport. I wish the US was capable of working towards and achieving large-scale societal goals like that.
We are. Just look at the current administration. What they've accomplished in just 6 months is staggering.
We've just let the wrong sort of people control our communication infrastructure, set the messages disseminated by that infrastructure, and take power in a multi-pronged attack.
There's no reason there couldn't have been an FDR-esque strongman driven emulation of China's approach.
Instead we're blowing up the national debt, cutting services, dismantling soft power, destroying our scientific and academic infrastructure, and expanding the military.
It's always easier to tear things down than it is to build things, the past 6 months are staggering but not because they're impressive.
Arguably Americans voted for all of that, though. It was laid out in a document that was public years in advance.
Well, there are varying opinions on that. I agree with you somewhat, but many that "voted for that" have said otherwise and either 1) didn't ever hear about said document or 2) actively dismissed it as "fake news" or 3) believed the president when he said he'd never heard of it and it wouldn't be his agenda.
Trump himself, and his spokespeople, all publicly denied that they had anything to do with Project 2025 ahead of the election. It was a laughable lie, the only people who believed it were apparently the media, who reported it as fact.
And the numpties who voted for him.
We once were. We built canals, a massive railroad system, then our interstate system. Likely a sign of our slow decline to a has been country.
Today we should be building subways, a hub and spoke high speed rail system, and an automated hub and spoke freight system that uses trucks only for first and last mile. And maybe a tunnel at the Bering straight.
> And maybe a tunnel at the Bering straight.
Interesting idea. Why?
Presumably to connect Amerikka Oblast to Mother Russia.
None of it even makes any sense. So, our national ability to predict whether it's going to rain this weekend, anywhere in the country, is "climate change alarm?"
They're just evil and want to maximize short term profit with no consideration of side effects or impacts to future trajectories, and their ideas are so stupid and shortsighted they don't even maximize short term profits either.
You're talking about an administration voted in by people who attack meteorologists because they think they cause hurricanes[0], and a President who has called climate change a Chinese hoax.
This is a perfectly rational set of policies as far as these people are concerned. How else are we going to stop the Jewish space lasers?
[0]https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/14/us/meteorologists-threats...
I don't think they're educated enough to know the difference.
It's one of those troublesome "reality has a left wing bias" problems. If you let the facts express themselves too much, the gap between truth and propaganda becomes too noticeable. Can't have that.
It's funny that they call it planning for the unplannable when the NWS have given extremely specific instructions on what to do in all sorts of inclement situations. This passage was just baffling.
Don't look up
Yeah:
> "The Pentagon ... announced that we are eliminating woke climate change programs and initiatives inconsistent with our core warfighting mission," [Chief Pentagon Spokesman Sean Parnell] said.
* https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/41...
See also "Pentagon Starts Purging Climate Change Measures":
* https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/trump-pentagon-pu...
But from 2021 (during Biden), "Climate change is a risk to national security, the Pentagon says"
* https://www.npr.org/2021/10/26/1049222045/the-pentagon-says-...
> https://gizmodo.com/republicans-project-2025-would-end-free-...
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_...
Also talked about in Michael Lewis’s book Fifth Risk.
> Also talked about in Michael Lewis’s book Fifth Risk.
Highly recommend that book. Haven't gotten to his most recent Who Is Government?:
* https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/788713/who-is-govern...
But from the interviews it sounds interesting as well. Colbert interview from April 2025:
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T30BF32qPgg
Thanks for the heads up, added to the list
That will surely make US agriculture great again.
Time to buy Gatorade stock
It's got what plants crave
If I wanted to gamble on stocks I'd rather look for a way to short Nvidia sometime soon.
What you replied to…wasn’t really investment advice.
To me, gambling and investment are very different activities.
Project 2025 strongly opposes everything good in this world.
To them, it’s bad, to us, it’s good. Good and bad are subjective when one side refuses science. You can show them data until you’re blue in the face but they won’t understand it, they won’t listen to reason because they are on a mission to remake the US like their racist grandfathers liked it. All workers report to the floor.
Their adherents are too irony impaired to realize that "they are the baddies".
Project 2025 is 46% completed: https://www.project2025.observer/
Strange that their progress distribution chart shows a lower percentage (36%) which happens to be the correct one: https://www.project2025.observer/visualize/charts
That's not a meaningful percentage.
Project 2025 is a comprehensive conservative wish list. It's only scary because of the outrageous items mixed in with all the unremarkable ones that any conservative would put forth. You would expect any conservative, even a "good" one, to knock off a huge portion of the list just by virtue of being conservative; that tells us almost nothing about the likelihood of most of the rest of the list (especially from an administration that has at least claimed to disavow it)
Project 2025 is scary because of what it tells us about the American voters that support it, not because it has some sort of prognosticative power over what the Trump admin will actually do. It's about the Overton Window, not the Oval Office.
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?
First, shutting down programs like this is like leaving the lights off in your home because you can't make rent of the mortgage. Saving $0.025 off your energy bill is not going to meaningfully help.
Second, it’s at the top because it’s a public good of obviously enormous value that a common shmuck can understand.
I guess I'm a common shmuck. What is the public good, and specifically why is it a public good that is so difficult for the free market to provide that the government needs to run and subsidize it?
> What is the public good
Accurate, scientific information to make informed decisions that can affect your safety and well-being. If you have to drive over a bridge or close to a body of water every day but you know there is a high chance of flooding tomorrow would you still travel to the same high risk area?
What do you think is the role of government? To improve the lives of its citizens should be up there, do you agree?
It's not that weather is difficult for markets to provide. It's that it's worthwhile for the government to make it freely available to everyone.
Ask all of those people who just drowned in Texas and are complaining that the weather warnings should have been given sooner.
Is that a solution only governments can provide? And in that case was the failing at the federal or local level?
Why do you keep asking strangely presumptuous questions without answering the simple, direct questions yourself?
Are you honestly interested in discussion or are you more interested in pushing a particular narrative?
The failing was local, because the MAGA morons refused federal funding to install alarm systems because it came from Biden (until, of course, they quietly took it and redirected the funds to the Sheriff department).
The NWS worked perfectly and they were warned in time.
Public services like NWS use a public service model. The idea is literally to provide as comprehensive a service as possible.
A private service will provide a profitable service, which will be cut-down, nickel-and-dimed, and generally enshitified for profitability,
Financially, the relatively small cost of these public services makes a negligible contribution to taxes while providing huge national benefits.
>What is the public good...
... in providing a weather forecast?
>This is one I don't really understand why the change would be a huge deal in context
This is likely because you don't use the weather reports for anything of value/importance in your daily life - there are other professions / government departments / etc that DO use these reports and require them for safety reasons.
Just for a quick example anyone involved in aviation.
NOAA is a military agency. It is not civilian, like VA, ICE, or Dept of State.
Weather provided realtime marine, atmospheric, and solar weather to better equip theatres of war and aid.
Without weather, soldiers conducting defense, offense, or aid operations have that much less intel on making decisions. The side effect is less climate change and national weather reporting.
If anything, the stripping down soft power, intelligence, science, and everything seems like a plan to turn us into a 3rd world kleptocratic kakistocracy. Then again, capitalism has went from innovation and creation, to extraction and worsening.
Maybe its time to let China take the reins and show what socialism can accomplish. If the videos on Xiao Hong Shu (rednote) are any indication, they're doing absolutely superbly.
NOAA is under the Chamber of Commerce. The military has their own meteorological capabilities from what I understand, though they may also use NOAA data. I don’t know how you mean that NOAA is a military agency, as they are not in the chain of command of any military agency or group.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Oceanic_and_Atmospher...
Even their officers are not armed services, though they do receive a commission. I think you might be thinking of something that I haven’t seen or heard about, so please let me know if I am wrong.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NOAA_Commissioned_Officer_Corp...
> We should be cutting everything we can to avoid a complete train wreck though, why would this float to the top of the list?
It makes a lot more sense when you consider that certain people think that climate change isn't real while weather science supports the idea that the climate not only can change but is changing, and that humans are the cause of it.
That has nothing to do with daily weather reports. I feel you on the whole climate change debate, it just isn't relevant here.
Weather data is incredibly important to a huge number of activities and to the general safety of the public, which is why the government is providing it in the first place. Debt to fund it is almost certain to economically productive. The republican controlled congress is cutting taxes and raising debt levels. A similar argument could be made that we should continue to fund services and raise taxes to reduce deficits instead
Because it’s not a drop in the bucket, it’s not even a droplet of mist
There are so many things to clean up before you get to this
Given that, Idy pose the same question to you, why prioritize cutting this?
I would almost consider this public infrastructure and we should definitely keep it
Well to start with, I'd ask if its just an easy one to cut - maybe because there are alternatives or it isn't really on the level of a fundamental human right.
Balancing our budget is going to hurt like hell and everyone will bleed. That doesn't mean the answer is to say fuck it and keep racking up debt.
Given the context of the historically largest budget deficit alongside decreased taxes on the wealthiest Americans, it's genuinely hard to believe the goal of this cut is balancing our budget
If you care abut the deficit, then should cancel that big tax cut that was just signed into law.
The problem is this predicted cut and others are a drop in the bucket (for the government). They are a rounding error compared to what’s added to spending with the recent bill.
It isn't just the recent spending bill, we've been racking up debt since Clinton was in office.
While I agree this wouldn't make a meaningful dent in the deficit, every bit helps. Should we instead sit around until there's political will to take on the budget of the DoD, entitlements, and our debt's own interest payments?
How are you continuing to thump this simplistic debt narrative, when it's painfully clear that the actual goals of the current administration are to balloon the debt and to destroy US soft power and stability that encourage people loaning money to our government at lower interest rates?
Surely you can see that if you earnestly want to talk about principled shrinking of our government's debt burden, the first step is to oust the current regime so that such editorial decisions can be made with the intent of helping our country rather than as a movement to destroy us.
The same people who want to cut this service just added a million times that amount to the national debt. Any claim that this is about saving money is transparent bullshit.
Free weather data has massive positive externalities. Just like in so many other areas, this administration is destroying a common good to benefit a handful of private individuals.
The Norwegian Meteorological Institute also have free forecast for any location on earth: https://developer.yr.no/featured-products/forecast/
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...
They won't have access to the same primary data as the NWS. Although it might be an opportunity for something like PurpleAir.
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).
https://www.cnn.com/2017/10/14/politics/noaa-nominee-accuwea...
For now.
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/as-trump-slashed-weath...
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…
USA is only one country. What about the rest?
Feel free to add links to the APIs for your countries' meteorological services here. I know about Canada's: https://api.weather.gc.ca
Yep
"AccuWeather is excited to share important updates"
Yes. Yes, I'm sure you are.
Such corporate speak reminds me of “the values of the Carphone Warehouse”:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W2firijxQOo
"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.
There is public free weather, for now at least, where do you think the private weather companies source it from? They’re just repackaging it.
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).
https://open-meteo.com/
Looks promising, thanks!
Update: this worked; I switched to Open Meteo and brought back the site (also bot protections are on and seem to be blocking some stuff so hopefully that keeps things under the Open Meteo limit.)
The Norwegian MET has had it for years, for free. https://api.met.no/
They also provide yr.no which is widely used worldwide.
gnome use this in their weather app.
My app also shows yesterday's weather: https://weather-sense.leftium.com
- 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.)
Fantastic feature btw; certainly more than once I've wished weather apps/sites would show recent history.
I wanted the same thing, so I built: https://weather-sense.leftium.com
- 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.
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.
For https://luxweather.com I detect bots/scrapers by user agent and just serve them a fake forecast, brought our bill way down :)
Ha that's a great idea; proactive anti-bot solutions like that are hilarious
The march towards walled gardens continues.
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.
You can try it here: https://open-meteo.com
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.
Claude Code made short work of converting to Open Meteo and https://weather.bingo is BACK! great service, thanks!
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.
This is fantastic; thank you for it. The "try the API" page is also excellent!
So true, it is so awesome. I've just replaced my weather network bookmark with the open-meteo's "API Response" chart. I hope open-meteo doesn't mind :)
Have been meaning to look into OpenMeteo for https://luxweather.com
We've been using OWM but the One Call API quickly gets pricey when traffic spikes.
I use that in HomeAssistant. Love it!
In the Netherlands we have the KNMI data platform (https://dataplatform.knmi.nl) and also an open source weather app (https://gitlab.com/KNMI-OSS/KNMI-App).
I noticed that before when looking at some weather APIs. You have a lot better data in Europe available
Here's a convenient list: https://github.com/breezy-weather/breezy-weather/blob/main/d...
The Norwegian MET does, https://api.met.no/
They also provide yr.no which is widely used worldwide.
I think yr.no is the default source for Home Assistant
Openweathermap works: https://openweathermap.org/price
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.
I've recently found https://open-meteo.com/ - maybe that ticks some of the boxes?
https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/
Why is something so essential, so basic, like the weather forecast being privatized? Why is everything becoming so shit?
Because nothing can exist in America if middlemen don’t make money out of it, the more the better.
You can see a literal example of that thinking in the comments of _heimdall for whom valuable commons are unexploited business cases.
Everything's getting more expensive, and people need to get paid.
Because stupid people are easy to herd to the polls.
because good data costs money?
how would you feel if you were the SWE on the other side of this API and people demand it for free
This carries the same energy as arguing against "free" healthcare by claiming that doctors shouldn't be expected to work for free.
Nobody is expecting anybody to work for free. We expect government to pay for it. I think you know this and pretend not to for some reason.
There is an SWE on the other side of this API - and I imagine they are enjoying a government salary and pension for operating it... people accessing it for free wouldn't impact them.
Usually the opposite of privatisation is not that something magically appears for free, but that it is funded by a state.
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OpenWeather still has a free tier. https://openweathermap.org/
Yup! I use it for an IRC bot that allows users to request the current weather or a forecast for a location.
Unfortunately, the API for searching for a location is terrible and often gets locations wrong.
If you’d like a preview of what access to weather data will be like (soon) just have a look at access to nautical navigation charts.
Pirate Weather API https://pirateweather.net/en/latest/ which powers Merry Sky http://merrysky.net/
Time to dust off CloudyFS, the first filesystem to put the clouds in your files.
https://github.com/bhickey/cloudyfs
It is truly remarkable how some of those affluent & resourceful devs in the world come here to complain about an API that now requires a subscription.
Somebody, somewhere in the world has to build & maintain this API. Somebody's job depends on it. If you use it and you find it useful, you can afford to pay whatever they're willing to charge.
Otherwise, build & maintain your own. Make sure you never charge for it!!
Just an FYI: almost all third party weather apps including AccuWeather are privacy invasive
https://www.vice.com/en/article/stop-using-third-party-weath...
Semi off-topic, but does anybody know a good weather radar app that has coverage outside the US (with particular interest in Europe)?
Apple/Dark Sky seems to only cover a very limited number of countries (despite many more providing radar data under open access), and zoom.earth seems to be shutting down precipitation radar by September.
I'm working on a weather web app that has world-wide radar coverage: https://weather-sense.leftium.com
The radar data is from the RainViewer API: https://www.rainviewer.com/api.html
- Hmm... it seems this API is also being limited/discontinued...
- I think past radar will continue to work, but only to zoom level 10/7.
- And the future 30-90 minutes of predicted radar will no longer work.
My project was inspired by: https://merrysky.net (And the OG Dark Sky UI)
I second windy. Very detailed and precise. Supports several models/data sources like ECMWF, Arome, Meteo Blue etc. They still have a free tier with a 5-day forecast and a very expensive premium tier (10 days, I believe??) - but everything longer than 5 days tends to get increasingly im precise anyways.
My use case is usually evading thunderstorms when cycling/hiking, which are ~impossible to predict more than a few hours ahead of time anyway, so this works perfectly. Thank you!
I use WetterOnline, it's German but I think it covers all of Europe.
Windy
https://wttr.in/ ftw
Strange timing, with all the talk of NOAA cuts.
A dark day for State College. What's next? No more Peachy Paterno at the Creamery? The Waffle Shop burning down?
Brings back good memories. One of the first things I ever built was a Twitter weather bot using their free API.
I assume you meant “weather bot”
Yes lol
I assume AccuWeather is receiving large cloud egress bills and thus needs to start charging?
The NWS is being gutted so Accu is preparing to rake in extortionate profits off public safety information.
im still mad apple bought and killed darksky. ripped one of the best weather apis
Thank you for my daily trigger.... I am also still mad about this.
I'll just keep scraping
A while back I RE'd the accuweather mobile app and pulled out the API key, it wasn't too hard.
I can see it already:
In other news, AccuWeather servers overwhelmed with requests after shutting down Weather API
Nah. We just need one source to scrape them and make the results available for others.
Enshitification and hyperinflation marches on, powered by the leadership of DOGE.
I used ForecastBar until they went to a rent-only-but-never-own model where a frickin' weather app has tiers. WTF!? Don't get me started on the weather.com apps either.
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the forecast calls for enshittification
As @otterly already posted there has, is and will always be weather.gov
As a matter of fact US Commerce department provides many API services including free geolocation (wuuut) via census.gov among so many services
A side note about Trump and politics/shmolitix etc: his stageshow budget cuts will have short term impact but will likely be repaired when the House flips and Dems make gains in the Senate after the mid terms. A lot of White Americans living at or below the poverty line will be hurt by the scheduled cuts and will have questions n' thoughts, but man this Epstein footcannon-nuclear-grenade-launcher of Trump's just might be the thing that ends Republican Party's 10 year abusive relations with an objectively adjudicated and multifacted criminal
The scientists I know have been pretty loud about there being no good way to repair what's been broken. Stuff can't just be turned on again.
I do expect more than just flipping off a switch: at some level there'll be outright sabotage, of data systems or physical hardware or both, for the purposes of destroying what is being made to go away.
This is because that's why it's being done. Budget concerns were never the point. It's the wholesale destruction of American soft power and indispensable systems. That's why I expect physical sabotage under cover of 'decommissioning'.
Have you not been paying attention for the past several decades? Trump is unprecedented in audacity, crassness, and degree of harm. But the overall trend is right in line with what Republicans have been doing for thirty+ years (at least as long as I've been paying attention). And no, the destruction does not cause people to vote Democrat in response. People become more desperate, more reactionary, more quick to blame their fellow citizens, and more easy to lead towards supporting even more destruction - this is exactly how we've arrived at Trump in the first place. When the Democrats do get back in office, they effectively act as controlled opposition. Even if they try to undo the damage, most actions are sabotaged by a few "moderates" that have been captured by the corpos just like the Republicans. And then the Republican machine goes to work projecting - pointing to the Democrats' failings as open corruption, inability to do anything, fiscal irresponsibility as price inflation finally appears from the Republicans' profligate spending, etc.
Personally I'm not really worried about the "no more elections" panic narrative, because I think the real answer is that there isn't going to be much of a federal government left to take the reigns of.
White Americans have been self-sabotaging for 150 years and it is fine with them, they are completely happy with this situation as long as Black Americans are harmed at least as much. This is the only motivating reason behind about a third of the American electorate.
How the winds are changing
I imagine there is a lot of new pressure on public APIs now that there’s an explosion of vibe coded projects accessing them (some probably quite haphazardly).
It's probably just good old-fashioned greed. Worked for X and Reddit, why wouldn't it work for them?
Uhm, having a weather api is probably the easiest thing to implement because of how catchable it is. Any public api accidental can be prevented by tiered rate-limiting:
- uber low limits for anon access
- low, but reasonable for register free users
- Up-to-you for paid users
You might say: well, proxies are cheaper than paid plan, and solution to that - charge reasonable price.
you should see what happened when people finally understood XMLHttpRequest!