> It removes a sense of artificial precision that doesn’t really exist because weather forecasts fundamentally have very high uncertainty and error bands.
So true.
Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.)
Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all.
So https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view.
Even without any text labels, you should be able to get a feel for what the weather is and how it will change:
- Hourly plots like Dark Sky, with everything (temperature, rain, AQI, weather conditions) in a single plot.
- The change in temperature visualized with both color and space. Space is obvious (higher -> hotter); color ranges from red for hottest to blue for coldest. All the visible plots share the same color-temperature mapping. So the gradient block to the left shows both the temperature range for that day as well as how it compares to other days.
This is neat, but I find the charts extremely hard to parse due to the color gradients and the similar shades, especially of blue and teal. I find the Merry Sky charts a lot easier to understand.
- Claude Opus 4.5 helped add several features I had been planning.
Some features were added on a whim because AI makes experimenting so cheap. Like the UI color gradients reflecting the color of the sky based on time of day.
Just needed to point Claude at https://hw.leftium.com/#/item/44846281. Then we worked together to tweak the palette colors and UX (like smoothly transitioning between colors, tweaking more vibrant sky colors)
Oh thanks for sharing but it seems I would still need to get kagi if I wanted to do !cobalt and I just wanted it to be something which can be used by just about anybody. (Imagine seeing someone downloading something on shitty website and being like oh let me help you and boom)
I think kagi's nice but this is some real pain which I feel like could be solved via nilch with not much pain as well.
Perhaps you can add the cobalt bang to kagi's global list so that people like us who don't use Kagi can use it as well too since the bangs are free for everyone.
- The link above embeds the cobalt "launch plan" (config) in the URL, but it could also be added as one of the built-in plans like https://mm.leftium.com/svelte.
So true.
Open Meteo supports 28 different WMO weather condition codes[1]. Most weather apps only support half as many. (Just "rain" instead of light/moderate/heavy rain.)
Showing all 28 is less helpful because of the noise. More useful just to show it might rain for a period of several hours vs oscillating between light rain and heavy rain. The light vs heavy precision wasn't worth it when there was high uncertainty whether it would even rain at all.
So https://weather-sense.leftium.com consolidates hours with similar weather conditions into a single segment by default. You can click on the weather icons at the left of the plots to toggle the original unconsolidated view.
[1]: https://weather-sense.leftium.com/wmo-codes
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