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News Another one bites the dust

13Gigatons

13Gigatons

Diamond Member
Intellicast is being "transitioned" to Weather Underground. WU sucks after they were bought up by The Weather Company.

Intellicast was at least functional during storms and the website layout was a breeze. WU is a complete mess that doesn't function during good weather.


The Weather Company has become renowned for its ability to successfully combine the power of unparalleled industry knowledge, the experience of an unprecedented number of meteorologists and five state-of-the-art Global Forecast Centers. TWC’s internationally recognized experts in tropical weather, climatology, and severe weather apply their skills to cutting-edge technologies designed to constantly improve our abilities to forecast, detect and visualize the disruptive weather events that affect the safety and property of our clients and their customers. The Weather Company is owned by a consortium made up of NBC Universal and the private equity firms The Blackstone Group and Bain Capital.
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WU blows chunks.

I have linked my weather station to WU since 2005. About a month ago, they allowed someone with a new station that is located just over half a mile from me to use the exact same station name. How effing lame is that crap 😡

I have complained to them, their response.............. silence........... ef'em
 
Yeah, WU is garbage. Their map was broken for months. I emailed them and they said "Yeah, we know". Excellent work.
 
:anguished: I've used Intellicast for many years. Intellicast has long been an interface for WU -formatted data loaded from WU servers. Seeing the transition announcement - I checked out WU today, in-depth, and was decidedly disappointed in their site. Maps don't zoom in close enough, and lack directional vectors and county lines. I can't get a descriptive daily forecast - just a brief tabular format. I'm hoping there's better alternatives out there. :persevere:
 
I emailed Intellicast years ago, complaining about caching pages, rather than pulling the latest snapshot from the servers. I don't care how the radar looked 20-30 minutes ago, I want the current view. My email advised they auto-refresh the radar imagery by modifying the HTTP headers. They heeded my counsel and made the pages refresh constantly, though maybe it strained the servers too much (?) ... so they reverted to letting you refresh on your own. I really don't see why a weather site would allow its time-sensitive pages to be cached. Maybe I should blame my ISP.
 
The only official weather reporting location in my county (of +900K residents) was the local, and only, airport. Their ability to report conditions went offline if the temp went above 85F or below 35F. Now they are no more as a reporting location. So, complaining about a website that uses data is kind of meaningless when no meaningful data is collected on my county.
 
I'll miss Intellicast. My brother works for the NWS and he told me about this site 10yrs ago. Its a great free site for weather.
https://weather.cod.edu/ I am still a WeatherTap fan for paid services, but its been years since I was a member there.
 
lxskllr said:
I use NOAA weather. I paid for that shit, and I'm gonna use it. Works well enough.
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Yep, I killed the default weather app on my phone and bookmarked the NWS forecast for my fair city. The default app pulled from the weather channel and always gave the extreme end of the forecast range generated by the weather service (does any provider do anything but interpret the NWS anyway?). So if the NWS says "temps 105-108F today" the default app would list 108F. If the NWS said lows" -15 to -f'-me-dead" the app would say -f'-me-dead". Twas annoying.
 
For National and Regional weather, that's exactly the data that TWC relies upon. They do some computational data of their own I believe, but it's mostly interpretations of existing data, maybe some of their own satellite imagery. You don't get accurate local forecasts from TWC because the NWS data isn't exactly a perfect localized weather predictor, rather it's all regional patterns. Local forecast teams usually have better success at not only interpreting the NWS data, but they do that using local measurements and radar to see into local conditions, from which they eek out more nuanced local predictions from the national data.
 
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