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Changes to Textforecast and Locationforecast

13 November 2019

tags: textforecast - locationforecast - locationforecastlts

We will shortly be making some changes to the existing versions of Textforecast and Locationforecast.

Textforecast

The seahigh and seabank products will be replaced with a new, auto-generated product (named sea) which will be available on December 3rd (possibly earlier). The old forecasts will continue production until February 1st, after which requests will be returned the new sea forecast instead.

Locationforecast

We will shortly be changing the backend for the locationforecast to a new, cloud-based service. For the immediate future there will be very little change for the users except for higher performance. There are some minimal changes to the version 1.9 output, in short:

  1. Only 1- and 6-hour forecasts will be supported, the 2- and 3-hour intervals will be removed.

  2. We have added precipitation minvalues and maxvalues for the whole forecast for the Nordic and Arctic regions, not just the first two days:

    cipitation unit="mm" value="0.0" minvalue="0.0" maxvalue="0.6" />

  3. The EPS, LOCAL and EC* models in the meta header are no longer relevant. We now how only one model (met_public_forecast), with a single runended and nextrun timestamp.

  4. The global forecast (outside the Nordic and Arctic regions) will be shortened by 6 hours. As a compensation it will update every 6 hours, instead of every 12 hours as previously.

If you experience any problems due to these changes, we suggest temporarily switching over to LocationforecastLTS until you can make the necessary changes.

LocationforecastLTS

As Locationforecast and LocationforecastLTS currently runs on the same old backend and is virtually similar, we have decided to end-of-life this product as it is impossible to guarantee the same output on the new backend. This means LocationforecastLTS will be officially deprecated once the new model is in production, but will not be terminated until the end of February 2020 at the earliest (which should be plenty of time to change your implementation). Since the new backend is much faster and has a more correct forecast, we suggest changing over to I as soon as possible.

Plans for next year

Some of the planned changes for the next 6 months include:

Locationforecast

In the long term we will be launching a new 2.0 version, which features:

  • a new, proper JSON format (instead of conversion from XML)
  • probability values (as in the current probabilityforecast)
  • UV index data (replacing the current UVforecast product)
  • more understandable weathersymbol codes, hopefully without the need to contact sunrise

At the same time we will be deprecating the Probabilityforecast and UVforecast products since the data will now be available in Locationforecast instead.

Radar and Radarlightning: These will be consolidated into a new version Radar/2.0, with removal of some unused products and replacement of GIF animations with Javascript templates.

UVforecast: These are produced by external parties, and we experienced distribution problems last summer. Since UV data will be available in locationforecast/2.0, the UVforecast product will be terminated after Easter

  1. UV maps should still be available from external distributors.

ExtremesWWC: This product will be replaced by a similar feature on our observations and climate API frost.met.no.

We do not have exact dates for the above changes, but will return with updates once we have more specific information.

—Geir Aalberg