WeatherUnderground shutting down free service
Hello everyone,
just to highlight this here, since it will affect lots of people.
I use WUnderground for some other systems in my (smart)home.
This information was recently posted on WeatherUndergrounds API website:
https://www.wunderground.com/weather/api
To improve our services and enhance our relationship with our users, we will no longer provide free weather API keys as part of our program. If you have been directed to download our Weather Underground free API key by a third party provider, please contact your vendor for resolution.
Existing API keys are most likely still going to work for some while, but thats nothing that I would take for granted.
Can anyone recommend another weather service with API access? I already started experimenting with integrating the DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst - German public weather service). If there is a good alternative with global weather data, I'd take a look at it.
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Hi Nicholas,
i finally found the time to set up a dev environment on a linux. I migh be able to take a shot at a DWD parser the next few days.
An example cvs can be found here:
http://opendata.dwd.de/weather/local_forecasts/poi/10637-MOSMIX.csv
This is the one that I am testing with. It's around 10kb.
The information in the file, including the field descriptions are all in english. So if you want to try, you'd probably be faster.
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So I hacked something together that might be working.
I have to test it on my rainmachine now. I can provide the code if there is interest. How? GitHub?
Its getting more and more off-topic, but: Is there a way to directly feed an evapotranspiration value into RainMachine from a parser? I just saw that DWD provides a value "potential evapotranspiration last day" in "kg/qm" ...
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Nicholas, is there any update on a solution?
I just installed my RainMachine Saturday, and integration with Weather Underground was the main selling point. I don't have a developer key. The NOAA forecast is significantly different than the actuals.
Trying to decide if I want to return it as, again, I bought it due to the WU integration.
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Hi Sebastian,
That's great ! Although I see that our higher powers must approve your posts (not sure why it hits the spam filter).
Yes you can send a pull request on GitHub or as a gist on GitHub so I can look. As for the EvapoTranspiration you can add the value with addValue() call by specifying
data type to be RMWeatherDataType.ET0 but it has to be in mm per day.
We should probably make a new thread on Developers section to continue.
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Nicholas,
Can you elaborate a little more on how the Weather Underground is now working with beta?
I am a beta user with the latest software and firmware., I have a PWS and an API key that I have been using the last year or so. I have changed nothing and my PWS has been working fine but as of about a week ago I am get the message "could not get station data" on the rainmachine web interface. Again I have changed nothing.
Is this how it is suppose to be now?
thanks
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Definitely no, current beta can get station data without an API key. API key is still required for WUnderground forecast. Having an API key only enables forecasting on WUnderground.
Is the station ID listed on Nearby Weather Station list ? Can you give me your station name to check it manually ?
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Just trying to understand the situation now with Weather Underground . . .
I do not have my own PWS. I have a "free" API key that has been used for over a year to receive data from the specified station. Recently, the system has been showing the message that it could not get specified weather station data. With no more free API keys, I think I couldn't just generate a new API key as Mark52479 has done.
I have just added a bunch of nearby weather stations to the Weather Underground info. Hopefully, this will correct the problem.
Is there anything else to try?
EDIT: Just refreshed after adding the new weather stations and status now shows "Success", so maybe the prior single station I had specified wasn't reporting. It was an airport ID, so that is curious, but I guess possible.
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I agree that WU is beginning to suck. And I understand the source of their "corporate" changes. But: WU still makes the data available for free, just in a format that is not useful for an API. Just go to the WU web site, click on any old personal weather station, and you can look at all the wonderful graphs of weather data. You can even take screen shots of that. You just can't get at it programmatically (meaning: efficiently) for free.
The perverse thing is: I can't even get to the data from my own weather station, which I uploaded to IBM = WU, using my money to buy a weather station, my time to install and maintain it, and my money to pay for the DSL to upload it to WU. And I didn't give IBM = WU an exclusive license to my data, so they don't have the right to prevent me from doing with the data as I please. However, they are under no legal obligation to make it easy to get my data once I've uploaded it. And clearly it is in their interest to not let potential competitors get at bulk data, so they make it deliberately hard. Not illegal, just immoral. Given the corporate transitions at WU (-> Weather.com -> IBM), that shouldn't surprise anyone.
Still, WU has value for me. It's nice that I can get a convenient graphical version of my weather data, can quickly find neighboring weather stations, and compare their data.
If someone hears of good alternatives to WU for uploading weather data, please post here; I'm interested.
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