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 2020:
The following have also been deprecated, probable EOL times as indicated:
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.
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
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.
