Own a weather station? We want your data

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Personal Weather Station Hardware

  • WeatherFlow Tempest strongly recommended: no moving parts, solar-powered, very low maintenance in varied climates; praised local UDP stream and simple APIs, but unclear if fully usable without cloud signup.
  • Davis (Vantage Vue / Pro2, sonic anemometer) viewed as very high quality and long-lived, but expensive and hampered by proprietary data loggers (some hardware changes apparently to block DIY loggers).
  • Ambient Weather WS-2902/WS-5000 popular mid-range choice: under ~$200–$500, Wi‑Fi, CWOP upload, custom REST endpoints, but some earlier setups required custom scripts.
  • KestrelMet and Netatmo mentioned as solid all‑in‑one options.
  • Some interest in ultrasonic anemometers and compact Doppler radars; true weather radars are acknowledged as very expensive.

Integration, Software & Data Sharing

  • Many users integrate with Home Assistant, custom scripts, Prometheus/InfluxDB, SQLite, Node‑RED, and Grafana.
  • CWOP and MADIS are central to getting home-station data into NOAA; some stations or vendors push directly, removing user effort.
  • weewx on Raspberry Pi is widely cited as a FOSS hub for ingesting station data and forwarding to CWOP and others.

Government vs Commercial Weather Ecosystem

  • Strong criticism that commercial “Big Weather” firms get vast government data for free, then resell it with heavy tracking/ads; some have lobbied to limit public forecasts.
  • Counterpoints: NOAA is not necessarily “extremely underfunded”; much private “proprietary” data is of limited value and rarely used in full numerical models.
  • NOAA already runs programs (e.g., National Mesonet, commercial data pilots) to acquire non-government observations.

Data Quality, Bias & Forecast Use

  • Concerns about low-quality or badly sited home stations (e.g., on hot roofs). Others note bias can be detected, weighted, and partially corrected statistically.
  • Some say surface station density adds little where good data already exists; aloft observations matter more for model skill, with surface data often used mainly for bias correction / downscaling.
  • Platforms like Weather Underground and others provide siting guidelines.

APIs, Reliability & Alternatives

  • Complaints about weather.gov APIs returning frequent 500s, bloated responses, and opaque outages; others note ongoing migrations and infrastructure changes.
  • Suggestions: consume push feeds (MADIS, text products), cache locally, and monitor NWS notification channels.
  • Open-data aggregators (e.g., Open‑Meteo, meteostat) and national services (yr.no, Met Office WOW) are highlighted as fast, ad‑free, API‑friendly alternatives.

DIY, Remote & Niche Setups

  • Several build ESP32/Raspberry Pi–based stations using off‑the‑shelf sensor kits, MQTT, and local databases.
  • Some run remote solar + cellular stations and flood gauges; lack of official ingestion pipelines in some countries limits their broader utility.