Today, I discovered that one of our old standby weather outlets has discontinued it’s API for hobbyists and kids (which apparently, some companies have been using as their standard weather feed – that was a violation of the terms of use – which many people just click-through anyhow…) – but, actually, most of the folks are weather nuts, like me, and want to use the API to bring in information to look at weather data trends, and such because they just want to do this.
Some are people who have these weather stations in their backyards that they purchased, to contribute to the “micro forecasting” or just have their own more reliable weather info, collected by them.
I will mention that during Harvey, these were helpful for our local neighborhood rainfall amounts – and we used them (those that remained “UP” during that event – some didn’t).
So the Weather Underground (cute name, huh?) is instructed to pull the plug on this API service. They “can’t cope with the number of calls” – yeah right – it’s more that The Weather Company doesn’t want to – wants to charge money for it – parent company of The Weather Channel, et. al. – commercial circus and dramatic weather reporting as evidenced by the guy acting like the wind was extreme while people were walking normally behind him – caught on video during Florence this year.
It’s run by IBM. That’s right — how big can you get? I don’t think I want to give them my credit card number. I also don’t want them to be connected with my website because I’m using their API. It’s the principle of the thing.
So much for “giving back” by making data available to people who want to use it to teach their kids how weather data works and understand their world better.
Yeah. So much for that.
