Ho, ho, ho and some API stocking fillers
20 December 2019
We hope you all have been good developers this year, in which case you can look forward to some new improved products next month (for those who have been bad we will also be taking some away).
Locationforecast
On December 3rd we launched the new backend for locationforecast/1.9. In connection with that some of our users have noted that the topography for Norway is not as accurate as before. This is because we use a terrain model with a slightly coarser resolution. This does not affect the quality of our temperature forecasts. However, due to requests from our users we will soon return to a higher resolution topography for Norway.
Next year we also plan to introduce a higher resolution topography for our global forecasts. This will make the forecast more accurate when not using the recommended “msl” parameter to indicate elevation, which is hard to implement e.g. in mobile apps.
We are also working hard on finalizing the JSON format in 2.0, as well as improving the weathericon symbols so that you won’t have to call sunrise to know if to use a night or day version.
Radar animations
Due to popular demand, we have decided to continue GIF animation in radar/2.0 which will launch on Feb 3rd. Everything else will be different though, included sizes (only one), areas (previously called radarsites), types (more options) and formats (all static images are now in PNG).
Radar/1.5 will continue running until May 15th so you have plenty time to update your systems. We still have plans to launch a Javascript animation version, but this is not a high priority.
More changes on Feb 3rd
Next year the sigcharts in upperwindweather will be moved to a new product, possibly with some new charts to follow. The upperwindweather product will then be deprecated, and eventually removed from the public api.
We will also be launching a new version 2.0 of icemap with more and better maps of the Arctic. The old version 1.5 will continue running until March.
We have also decided to retire the little-used lightning product on api.met.no. Since you now can download lightning data more or less in real time from Frost, there is little use for 5 min old data from the API. The data will continue to be delivered in UALF format as before. You can test out the new product here (remember to register for a developer key).
Finally the radar/1.5 and uvforecast products will be end-of-lifed on May 15th, to be replaced by the improved radar/2.0 and locationforecast/2.0 respectively.