Les Niles <[email protected]> writes: > Do you use the NWS spot forecasts? I live on a ridge in the Santa > Cruz mountains with no NWS stations around and weather that is very > different than the valleys on either side. The NWS forecast is pretty > accurate, and much better than DarkSky which doesn’t seem to > understand that we’re above the usual summer inversion. I extended > the weewx forecast module to support the NWS spot forecasts.
Agreed that NWS point forecasts (as they call them; I'm guessing that spot is another word for the same thing) are good. The other question is how many places are actually creating forecasts, vs repackaging NWS forecasts without attribution. While that's legal as they are in the public domain, being works of the United States, I don't think it's polite. (I don't know what DarkSky is actually doing.) It seems that NWS, and perhaps some other governments, run models and make the results, and then NWS makes forecasts from multiple models (applying forecaster judgement). TV stations etc. also make forecasts from the models, and only sort of attribute the model data as taxpayer-funded NWS outputs. So I guess the big question is if DarkSky is 1) just publishing NWS forecasts (and perhaps other agency forecasts in other places, like UK and the Met Office) 2) repackaging some other forecasts based on NWS models 3) using NWS data and making their own forecasts 4) repackaging some other forecast not based on NWS models I think 1 is mostly likely, because 2 and 3 seem to involve having to pay (or put up with TV ads) and adverse terms, and 4 I have never heard of. -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "weewx-user" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/weewx-user/rmiftetyvs6.fsf%40s1.lexort.com.
