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The Death of Weather Underground


hooralph
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Anyone have any insider perspective on why their mobile app and web site have slid into irrelevance? I know they have had ownership changes that have likely triggered this, but after years of evolving their utilitarian sites into a really elegant and highly usable UI:

  • The app (at least for me) is completely unusable. Maybe it traces to the fact that I have a "no ads" subscription, which they broke in a release earlier this year, then fixed. Only to now have no data load. Ever. (Though amusingly, push alerts still work).
  • The website has slowed to the point of being unusable.
  • They also have completely obfuscated all of the NWS stations, making them impossible to find and stick. A few weeks ago I thought I found a hack and found the old station-based URL's worked. e.g.: https://www.wunderground.com/weather/us/ny/KNYC

    Only today I tried that again and found, after briefly showing me the KNYC report, it redirects to some garbage station that is 8 degrees hotter.

Whatever has happened - neglect, starved for resources by the parent company... nefarious effort to push their network at all costs - it saddens me as I still can't find an app I like as well.

Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 3.01.40 PM.png

Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 3.01.45 PM.png

Screen Shot 2018-09-04 at 3.02.42 PM.png

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  • 3 weeks later...

I'm still not over their map change. I'm still searching for a suitable replacement, but this is the best I've found thus far:

http://weather.wdtinc.com/imap/imaplite/?MAPID=10937&CLIENTID=20485

It's not perfect either, but at least it doesn't crash after several minutes. That plus these are my storm-mode links:

http://www.lightningmaps.org/?lang=en#m=sen;t=4;s=0;o=0;b=0.00;ts=0;

https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/exper/?parms=nrnmidat-02-24-0

https://weather.cod.edu/satrad/nexrad/index.php?type=LWX-N0Q-1-48

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  • 3 weeks later...

Weather Underground recently announced that their current weather api for developers will end in late December 2018.

It appears that they will be rolling out a new platform at the same time so that may explain why they have let their websites deteriorate. As a hobbyist web developer I hope they continue to support the pws community and  the many developers that depend on Weather Underground. If anyone has any insight into WU's plans please post a reply.

I developed a mobile friendly web page using WU's api. Any feedback would be appreciated. I plan on revamping the site early next year.

https://zipweatherinfo.com

 

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  • 2 months later...
On 10/27/2018 at 7:33 PM, Baroclinicity said:

Back in June or July they changed the pages for airport stations, no more historical Metars that I can see (only a table of decoded data). Pressure is rounded to a tenth of an inch in the observation section https://www.wunderground.com/history/daily/KCVG/date/2018-5-10?reqdb.zip=&reqdb.magic=&reqdb.wmo=

No more listing of the year of records. Is there any site that has information they used to have?

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On 9/4/2018 at 3:54 PM, doncat said:

This has been a topic of conversation for a while now...you said it, it's been downhill since the ownership changes. There is talk now that they're  trying to get their act together and fix the many problems, but we'll see.

We know why it happens, this is the case whenever a big corp buys a smaller company, TWC's owners are no different from MS, who have made a habit of doing it.  This is just as bad as the supermerger disease we are seeing across various industries that reduce competition and choices we all have.

 

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Weather Underground took over Intellicast earlier this month, and have ruined that site too.  Intellicast had a really nice interactive radar animation map.. now it's gone. I used to be a big fan of Weather Underground and Wundermap with their PWS data.. but between the awful ads and the takeover of other sites, they just keep getting worse and worse. Sad to see.. 

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On 1/26/2019 at 10:57 PM, wxnut said:

Weather Underground took over Intellicast earlier this month, and have ruined that site too.  Intellicast had a really nice interactive radar animation map.. now it's gone. I used to be a big fan of Weather Underground and Wundermap with their PWS data.. but between the awful ads and the takeover of other sites, they just keep getting worse and worse. Sad to see.. 

Yeah Intellicast's interactive radar was my go to map for nowcasting. I had an idea the weather company would eventually take down intellicast but it still left a sour taste in my mouth. The Wundermap is so slow and irresponsive for comparison.

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On 1/26/2019 at 10:57 PM, wxnut said:

Weather Underground took over Intellicast earlier this month, and have ruined that site too.  Intellicast had a really nice interactive radar animation map.. now it's gone. I used to be a big fan of Weather Underground and Wundermap with their PWS data.. but between the awful ads and the takeover of other sites, they just keep getting worse and worse. Sad to see.. 

That product was amazing when it was first rolled out/in beta...that was really an exciting time for my uses in radar. Unfortunately they screwed it up when they finalized it by changing the colour table in such a way that it undermines the dbz rate just at a glance. It was actually a tad in the opposite direction previously but I much preferred that dbz table.

I haven't been to Intellicast in a while but I'm surprised to hear they removed that interactive map altogether. I'm surprised it took this long before the corporate ruination took its course. I have no good radar anymore that is free to use as my remaining options are all putrid.

Haven't come across any up and coming sites that replace the zombied ones. I bet WU was pretty awesome around 2000 but a few years ago when I was visiting it, an exploit occurred through the browser and put a miner on my machine. Our world is getting dumber.

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On 1/28/2019 at 12:05 AM, BlunderStorm said:

Yeah Intellicast's interactive radar was my go to map for nowcasting. I had an idea the weather company would eventually take down intellicast but it still left a sour taste in my mouth. The Wundermap is so slow and irresponsive for comparison.

why is it even called The Weather Company- they should just say The Weather Channel and be done with it.  And also we need some deep government regulations to prevent these kinds of things- and supermergers.

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On 1/28/2019 at 1:05 AM, Torchageddon said:

That product was amazing when it was first rolled out/in beta...that was really an exciting time for my uses in radar. Unfortunately they screwed it up when they finalized it by changing the colour table in such a way that it undermines the dbz rate just at a glance. It was actually a tad in the opposite direction previously but I much preferred that dbz table.

I haven't been to Intellicast in a while but I'm surprised to hear they removed that interactive map altogether. I'm surprised it took this long before the corporate ruination took its course. I have no good radar anymore that is free to use as my remaining options are all putrid.

Haven't come across any up and coming sites that replace the zombied ones. I bet WU was pretty awesome around 2000 but a few years ago when I was visiting it, an exploit occurred through the browser and put a miner on my machine. Our world is getting dumber.

I found a way around their dumb blocks so that I can download data from their sites (including radars) and even put them on a spreadsheet so I never ever have to visit their site.  I cant really talk about it though- they might try to patch it lol.

 

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25 minutes ago, LibertyBell said:

I found a way around their dumb blocks so that I can download data from their sites (including radars) and even put them on a spreadsheet so I never ever have to visit their site.  I cant really talk about it though- they might try to patch it lol.

Nice, there are many sites that have become unbearable that would stand for taking raw data directly off from. If I undertake a forecast accuracy study I'd need to do that.

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8 minutes ago, Torchageddon said:

Nice, there are many sites that have become unbearable that would stand for taking raw data directly off from. If I undertake a forecast accuracy study I'd need to do that.

I figured I was justified, I paid $25 for a piece of software and they had told me that that it would be a one time fee.  After a year of happily using it, I found out that WU cut them off unless they went to a subscription-only model and made everyone pay $20 A MONTH!  The software stopped working and I went into it to see what happened, and they somehow modified it to delete the .INF file every time it was run so no data could be downloaded.  So I made my own .INF file and made it read-only so it couldn't be altered :P

Pretty simple and not illegal lol.

 

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  • 2 months later...

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