Hope you are all doing ok in these difficult times. Here at MET Norway it's business as usual. Most of us are working from home, but since the API team already did this for half the week there's not much difference. Here's a summary of the changes so far this year:
End of Life'd products
The following products have been deprecated and will be removed on 15 May 1 June 17 June 2020:
The following have also been deprecated, probable EOL times as indicated:
- LocationforecastLTS (August 2020)
- Locationforecast/1.9 (January 2021)
New products
Locationforecast 2.0
Version 2.0 is nearing completion, the only major feature missing is documentation. We have decided to split the output into three different endpoints:
- default (new, plain vanilla JSON)
- compact (a lite version of JSON with less bloat)
- classic (good old fashioned XML, to be used responsibly)
Also, the unit for temperature has been changed in JSON from "C" to "celsius" to conform with CF standards.
Weathericon 2.0
We are also happy to launch a new set of corresponding weather icons. Unlike the former numerical codes in 1.9, the 2.0 "symbol_code" variable is based on a mnemonic code and correspond exactly to the icon filename (minus extension). All icons are available in PNG, SVG and PDF formats, and can be downloaded as a gzipped TAR archive:
In addition you can also get a table matching the new and old symbol codes, as well as explanatory texts in English and several variations of Norwegian:
Radar 2.0
Radar have been upgraded to version 2.0, with new parameters, new areas, new sizes and a new projection. GIF animations will still be producted for the time being.
Sigmets 2.0
The new version 2.0 delivers both SIGMETS and AIRMETS, but now also includes wind shear warnings. You can now ask for each type separately, but by default you will get all in the same response. Also the long-standing bug where warnings would be included twice have finally been fixed.
Sigcharts
This was previously part of Upperwindweather, but has now been launched as a separate product.
Other changes
LocationforecastLTS
As mentioned last year we have deprecated the LocationforecastLTS product, which will be retired some time after we have launched the new Locationforecast 2.0. In the mean time, the background model for the Nordic area (MEPS) have been replaced with a new, improved model (CMEPS) which is run every hour.
Unfortunately, some little used parameters are no longer present in the new model, which means that some slight changes have been made to locationforecastlts:
- the parameter areaMaxWindSpeed was removed
- there will no longer be available time intervals backward in time
These changes are only be visible for the Nordic area (Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland). The rest of the world (which uses the EC model) remains unchanged.
MetAlerts
Some of you may have noticed that about half of the municipalities in Norway got new codes ("kommunenummer") this year. This was implemented in MetAlerts this March. As you cannot search on municipalites yet (only counties) rhis does not affect the API interface, but if you are extracting kommunenr from the CAP files you should search for both old and new numbers.
New backend
In March we changed the file storage backend for non-dynamic products. This should result in faster response times and greatly reduce the occurence of delivering stale data.
Future plans for 2020
- Icemap/2.0 (possibly with GeoJSON)
- Probabilityforecast/2.0, Nowcast/2.0 and Oceanforecast/2.0 in JSON formats