Just show me what's relevant!
Weather forecasting in the US has got really bad for no real reason. I'm not talking about the accuracy, I'm talking about the way the data is presented. Oddly, it's the professional weather sites that are the worst.
Here's what I want. I want a daily view of the weather for the next week. I want temperature highs and lows, chances of rain/snow when and how much, and some details on the wind if it's going to be unusual. A line of two of text would be great for each day. I don't mind ads, but I don't want so many that I can't read the data. It's not much to ask, but it seems like it's hard to get.
What the commercial sites give me
The commercial sites give me visual clutter everywhere. There are ads all over their pages. Of course, ads scream for attention, so multiple ads are distracting and make the page hard to use. If I try and change anything on the page, I get an ad I have to click away from. Because they have to allow space for ads and links to other content, the screen real estate they can use for data is very limited. Throw in some over-size icons and you leave even less room for text.
The hourly views they provide are very detailed, but oddly, poorly presented. If I want the hourly forecast for three days' time, I have to scroll through lots of stuff - which I guess is the point. The summary views are too truncated because of their cluttered presentations.
The radar charts are nice, as is the animation, but again they're distracting. The choice of colors makes me feel like I'm reading a 1980s superhero comic.
Of course, these websites have to be paid for and the money comes from ads. It seems like it's ads or subscriptions and I'm already paying too much in subscription fees.
Google and others
Google provides a very good weather summary, as do a number of other sites. Unfortunately, they don't provide all the data I want, but they get pretty close. Their data presentation is great too.
TV is the worst
Let me be blunt. I don't trust TV forecasts. I've read that they tend to exaggerate bad weather to get viewers, this includes exaggerating rainfall and exaggerating weather severity. I've read of TV forecasters who were asked by their station manager to make forecasts worse to drive ratings. There's a saying in journalism, "if it bleeds, it leads" and it seems like sometimes weather forecasts fit into this category. It may well be that some or all of my local stations are not like this, but I have no way of knowing. If they want to gain my trust, they should publish data on their accuracy, but none of them do.
For reasons I'll get to in a minute, AI has made me lose faith in TV forecasters completely.
NWS
By now, many of you will be screaming about the National Weather Service. They provide free forecasts and plenty of data via their API. They have exactly the data I want, but it's poorly presented. Their website feels very late 1990s, which is partly by design.
There's been an on-and-off campaign against the NWS for some time now. The argument against it is that it's unfair competition for the commercial weather forecast providers. Bear in mind that the commercial providers all use NWS data underneath and that we the tax payers have paid for weather collection. The push is to have the NWS stop providing data and forecasts to the public but still provide the data to commercial providers in bulk. In effect, this means the public will pay for data collection and pay again to see the data they paid to be collected. I can't help feeling that part of the awkward NWS data presentation is to deflect the unfair competition argument.
The NWS' parent agency is NOAA and recently, NOAA has suffered substantial cuts. At this time, it's not clear what the effect of these cuts are, but it can't be good for forecasting.
What I did about it
I built my own app using AI code gen and using an LLM to give me the text I wanted.
I wrote a long prompt to tell Cursor to build an app. I told it to get a US zip code, find the biggest town or city in the zip code, and convert it to latitude and longitude. Next up, I told it to get the NWS seven day forecast and pass the data to Google Gemini and produce a summary forecast from the data. Finally, I added in a weather chatbot, just because. I put the whole thing into Streamlit.
My app isn't perfect, but it's pretty close to what I want. It all fits on one page. It's easy to see the daily forecast and the overall summary is very readable. If I have questions, I can just ask the chatbot. I'm now using my app when I want a forecast because it has what I want and it's faster and easier to use than the alternatives. It's way better than watching the TV weather forecast and I'm convinced my app isn't biased to emphasize drama.
My app took 10 minutes to write.
Let me say this again. I built an app that's better for me than the existing weather forecasting services and I did it in 10 minutes.
There are implications here.
Let's say I'm a radio station and my existing meteorologist retires or leaves. Why not replace them with an app? I can generate a soothing calming voice using AI so I can automate the whole forecast and save myself some money. I can do the same thing if I'm a TV station too; I can hire someone cheap to read the forecast or generate a movie of the forecast. I could also amp up the urgency of any bad news without any fear of someone pushing back. In other words, AI is a game changer.
So long as the NWS exists and is providing free data, the potential exists to disrupt the weather forecasting market using AI.
What other markets like this could AI disrupt?
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