All good things must come to an end, hopefully to be replaced by something better. Here is an update of forthcoming changes to the weather APIs.
Locationforecast and Nowcast
As mentioned previously, the old versions of Locationforecast (1.9), Nowcast (0.9) and Weathericon (1.1) will terminate on March 1st, 2021. Incredibly, almost 70 % of the current API traffic is still using version 1.9, This means a lot of sites and apps will stop working shortly. We recommend everyone not yet upgraded to start working on this ASAP. Please see our docs for more information:
Yr APIs
The Yr API (forecast,xml and varsel.xml), developed by the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation NRK is also set to expire this summer, along with the old Yr site (retro.yr.no). All Yr API users should port their applications to use Locationforecast/2.0, noting the following differences:
- Yr API uses XML, we recommend JSON for Locationforecast
- Yr API uses placenames, for Locationforecast you must use lat/lon/altitude
- Locationforecast requires identification in the User-Agent header
For more information on porting from Yr, see the developer site:
Also, NRK is working on a one-time dump of their location database, which will give you the correct coordinates and altitude to use with Locationforecast and Nowcast, as well as the URL to the forecast on the new Yr site. This is expected to be ready in a few days. Please follow the mailing list or one of the sites above to get information on where to download it.
ExtremesWWC
As indicated, this product has long been deprecated, pending new functionality on Frost for the same purpose. Unfortunately this has not yet materialized, and now the production chain for ExtremesWWC is no longer supported. As a consequence we will turn it off tomorrow, February 5th 2021. Since this product only covers Norway and has only a handful of users, we hope you will forgive us the short notice.
2021-02-04, Geir Aalberg