Ho, ho, ho and some API stocking fillers 2019-12-20

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.

Changes to Textforecast and Locationforecast 2019-11-13

We will shortly be making some changes to the existing versions of Textforecast and Locationforecast.

Textforecast

The seahigh and seabank products will be replaced with a new, auto-generated product (named sea) which will be available on December 3rd (possibly earlier). The old forecasts will continue production until February 1st, after which requests will be returned the new sea forecast instead.

Locationforecast

We will shortly be changing the backend for the locationforecast to a new, cloud-based service. For the immediate future there will be very little change for the users except for higher performance. There are some minimal changes to the version 1.9 output, in short:

1. Only 1- and 6-hour forecasts will be supported, the 2- and 3-hour intervals will be removed.

2. We have added precipitation minvalues and maxvalues for the whole forecast for the Nordic and Arctic regions, not just the first two days:

3. The EPS, LOCAL and EC* models in the meta header are no longer relevant. We now how only one model (met_public_forecast), with a single runended and nextrun timestamp.

4. The global forecast (outside the Nordic and Arctic regions) will be shortened by 6 hours. As a compensation it will update every 6 hours, instead of every 12 hours as previously.

If you experience any problems due to these changes, we suggest temporarily switching over to LocationforecastLTS until you can make the necessary changes.

LocationforecastLTS

As Locationforecast and LocationforecastLTS currently runs on the same old backend and is virtually similar, we have decided to end-of-life this product as it is impossible to guarantee the same output on the new backend. This means LocationforecastLTS will be officially deprecated once the new model is in production, but will not be terminated until the end of February 2020 at the earliest (which should be plenty of time to change your implementation). Since the new backend is much faster and has a more correct forecast, we suggest changing over to I as soon as possible.

Plans for next year

Some of the planned changes for the next 6 months include:

Locationforecast

In the long term we will be launching a new 2.0 version, which features:

• a new, proper JSON format (instead of conversion from XML)
• probability values (as in the current probabilityforecast)
• UV index data (replacing the current UVforecast product)
• more understandable weathersymbol codes, hopefully without the need to contact sunrise

At the same time we will be deprecating the Probabilityforecast and UVforecast products since the data will now be available in Locationforecast instead.

Radar and Radarlightning: These will be consolidated into a new version Radar/2.0, with removal of some unused products and replacement of GIF animations with Javascript templates.

UVforecast: These are produced by external parties, and we experienced distribution problems last summer. Since UV data will be available in locationforecast/2.0, the UVforecast product will be terminated after Easter 2020. UV maps should still be available from external distributors.

ExtremesWWC: This product will be replaced by a similar feature on our observations and climate API frost.met.no.

We do not have exact dates for the above changes, but will return with updates once we have more specific information.