Weather Details are not accurate

[myopenflixr]

Hello,

I wanted to report a couple discrepancies on what is being reported in Pirateweather versus AccuWeather.

Pirateweather is showing current wind speed at 78.62 mph (SSW). It is a bit windy today, but actual wind speed according to AccuWeather is only 7 mph (SSW) with Max Wind Gusts of 20 mph.

Pirateweather is also showing humidity at 76% and AccuWeather is only showing humidity at 68%

Temperature and Air Pressure look to be pretty accurate compared to AccuWeather

Just thought I'd share this with you.

Thanks,
Mike

[myopenflixr]

Hi,

For comparisons, I took the following screenshots of Pirateweather and Dark sky to show a side-by-side comparison of the differences in the weather details. These screenshots are about 2 minutes apart in time.

For the most part, they are reporting fairly similar details with the exception of the Wind Speed

[alexander0042]

Hi, thanks for posting this report! It really helps me get a sense of how things are working by comparing against some other sources.

I'm happy seeing the icons and temperatures line up, since precipitation has always been one of the trickier things. Wind speed remains an issue though (also identified here: Pirate-Weather/pirate-weather-ha#16). Do you mind sharing roughly where in the world you are, since that helps with troubleshooting this!

I almost have things set up to use the higher resolution version of the GFS model, so I'm hopeful that helps somewhat here. I'll write up a better process document when the update goes live, but the main issue is that the GFS files were too big to fit in the lambda temporary storage space, so I've moved over to AWS Fargate, which has more room!

[myopenflixr]

Hi, I live in Hilliard, OH USA. Zip code 43026

I absolutely love this weather option versus any others that are out there and willing to give you the time it takes to get things working as expected!

I'm also more than happy to help with any testing that you may need from me, however I have virtually no coding skills. and can't help with that aspect

[alexander0042]

So this is interesting! It seems to be the classic computing problem of multiple things being incorrect, which makes it really hard to isolate exactly what's wrong.

Since you're in the US, the first problem doesn't apply to you, but it's pretty interesting! I was surprised to see this, but it turns out there's a bug in the original Dark Sky integration code I pulled from Home Assistant. The integration requests the "ca" units if it detects the install is outside the US. This is fine, but Dark Sky returns wind speed in kph in this case. However, the card displays it using m/s, which is incorrect.

This one has an easy fix, which I'll push out shortly as a new version- change the requested units to SI! It also appears to be an issue in the current Dark Sky integration for HA, so I'll submit a PR to fix that as well.

However, you're in the US, so this metric issue doesn't explain your problem. I checked the raw model data for that date, and the wind speed should have been about 17 mph, not the insane result I'm showing here. The question is why?

As a first step in debugging, do you mind checking https://weather.pirateweather.net/ next time you see a weird wind speed? I'm trying to work out if it's an issue with the integration, or my model processing.

Thanks,
Alexander

[alexander0042]

Metric wind speeds corrected in commit Pirate-Weather/pirate-weather-ha@e95083f

[myopenflixr]

I have updated to the new version and will continue to monitor. If I do see anything that appears to be off, I'll compare it to
https://weather.pirateweather.net/ as you requested and report back.

[alexander0042]

Holy cow, I found the issue! Wind speed is a combination of the X and Y components, and I take the vector magnitude sqrt(x^2 + Y^2) to get the wind speed. I did this correctly a dozen times in the script... except once, for the current data, where I had sqrt(x^2 * Y^2). Because wind speed tended to bound around 1-2 m/s, this was a smaller issue than you'd think, but definitely not correct, and more incorrect the higher the winds got!

I have a major update this weekend, so I've batched this fix as part of that, but starting next week the wind speed issues should be resolved

[myopenflixr]

Hi,

I just came across another discrepancy this morning. PirateWeather showing the temp is 36...However, in reality it's closer to 13.

Here's a screenshot of weather pulled from weather.pirateweather.net compared to weather.com. Hilliard, OH around 8:40am EST.

[alexander0042]

Thanks for catching this- I saw this in real time, which really helped troubleshooting!
It's a combination of two things- NOAA's distribution system crashed hard last night (https://www.nco.ncep.noaa.gov/status/messages/), which mean Pirate Weather hasn't been able to ingest any new results since then. However, the API should gracefully fall back on older forecasts, and it didn't do that.

However, the good news is that the shiny new V1.0 version of this API fixes this problem! I'm updating the <weather.pirateweather.net> front end to use the new version, so you can check that out shortly!

[cloneofghosts]

I'm seeing the same issue on my end with the incorrect data being shown. I looked at the API call and it's showing incorrect data there as well. There is no new API call for the 1.0 release right? I didn't see anything in the docs about if the API call has changed since the 1.0 release.

EDIT: Few hours after this post it did start to update the current conditions but it still seemed to off by quite a bit. It did fix itself recently so NOAA must have fixed their issues.

I'm still seeing the wind speed issue even after the 1.0 release though it doesn't seem as bad as before.

[alexander0042]

Hi,

I should be turning on the V1 version later today (you'll see a new field in the flags for version), so it's NOAA's improvements that should have the largest changes so far. However, I have updated the front end website (https://weather.pirateweather.net/) to use the new version while I'm testing it, so let me know if that is looking any better for you?

[alexander0042]

Actually, even better idea, if you'd like to help test the new version, change your API url from api.pirateweather.net to dev.pirateweather.net! I use that as my testing endpoint (it calls the latest Lambda code, as opposed to a stable version), but in this case is several steps ahead.

[cloneofghosts]

I tried to call dev.pirateweather.net but I get an empty response error when visiting. https://weather.pirateweather.net/ does seem to be better and has fixed the wind speed issue.

[alexander0042]

Weird- you might need to go into the developer portal and click subscribe to the .dev backend?

[cloneofghosts]

It seems to have fixed itself as the dev url works now.