Complete
over 3 years ago

WERETECH-9826

Weather forecast on 24 rather than 12 hours

Can you enrich the Toybox.Weather.getHourlyForecast() to give a forecast for 24 hours instead of 12 hours? 

Why we need a full day / 24 hours weather forecast? 

  1. in the morning, you need to know if there won't be a rain the whole day till the evening
  2. often you want to check weather for tomorrow to prepare before you go to sleep

Thanks for considering. This would make it finally usable. 

myneur
Parents
  • over 4 years ago

    > But the summer daylight in Europe is well over 16h. 

    Sure and summer daylight in northern Alaska is more than 1900h (approx. May 10 to July 30).

    > Without the 24h forecast, I consider the API use-less. 

    It may not be useful for your use case, but that doesn't make it useless. There are many reasons why the weather data we are providing may not be sufficient for a given application. Perhaps the biggest is that we only refresh hourly and we get the forecast for your current location. If you want the hourly forecast at Biancograt ridge and you're 100km away, the data we provide may not be helpful at all (depending on which direction the weather is coming from of course).

    Application developers have wanted access to weather data for some time, some explicitly asked for access to the weather data that was already available on the device (shown in the native weather widget). We are simply providing access to that data.

    I will file an enhancement request to update the system to provide 24h (or 48h) of forecast data, but I do not see it happening in the near term. In my mind the cost (24h forecasts require 2x the data maintained by the service and transmitted to the device, ignoring possible optimizations; plus the cost of updating the code that touches this data) greatly outweighs the benefits.

    > Just out of curiosity: who is your weather provider? 

    At the top level, we are. I'm not sure where we get the raw data from. I don't even have access to that code to find out. Even if I did have access, I'm not sure I'm permitted to say.

Comment
  • over 4 years ago

    > But the summer daylight in Europe is well over 16h. 

    Sure and summer daylight in northern Alaska is more than 1900h (approx. May 10 to July 30).

    > Without the 24h forecast, I consider the API use-less. 

    It may not be useful for your use case, but that doesn't make it useless. There are many reasons why the weather data we are providing may not be sufficient for a given application. Perhaps the biggest is that we only refresh hourly and we get the forecast for your current location. If you want the hourly forecast at Biancograt ridge and you're 100km away, the data we provide may not be helpful at all (depending on which direction the weather is coming from of course).

    Application developers have wanted access to weather data for some time, some explicitly asked for access to the weather data that was already available on the device (shown in the native weather widget). We are simply providing access to that data.

    I will file an enhancement request to update the system to provide 24h (or 48h) of forecast data, but I do not see it happening in the near term. In my mind the cost (24h forecasts require 2x the data maintained by the service and transmitted to the device, ignoring possible optimizations; plus the cost of updating the code that touches this data) greatly outweighs the benefits.

    > Just out of curiosity: who is your weather provider? 

    At the top level, we are. I'm not sure where we get the raw data from. I don't even have access to that code to find out. Even if I did have access, I'm not sure I'm permitted to say.

Children
  • over 3 years ago in reply to Travis.ConnectIQ

    Finally, we get so frustrated of not having this info from Garmin, that we built a backend that prepares an accurate weather forecast (from Climacell or Yr.no) for the watch and made it available to all by simply late! and simply analog!. It works as a charm.
    But if you ever make 24h forecast available, it would be much simpler. It would be great to add also a precipitation in mm. People just plan differently if there will be 1 mm and 10 mm of the rain. 

    Cheers.  

  • over 4 years ago in reply to myneur

    One thing to note here is you don't always get 12 hours.  I've seen as few as 9.  It seems to vary based on the actual time, and how far in the future they can provide a forecast.

    Another thing to note, is how long it's been since a device has gotten data from a phone.  If it last got data at say 13:00 and it's now 16:01, the old forecasts drop off, so you can actually wind up with no hourly forecasts..

    There's more in this thread:

    https://forums.garmin.com/developer/connect-iq/f/discussion/236408/weather-data-3-2/1121549#1121549

    I'm not looking for a change, but wanted to note this is something that you need to deal with in an app - you can't count on it always being 12 hours

  • over 4 years ago in reply to Travis.ConnectIQ

    > summer daylight in northern Alaska is more than 1900h

    Creative reply:) Nobody tries to get through the whole polar day by a single activity without sleeping though:) And that's the point. BTW when we were travelling in the polar day in Norway, our biological day (the time after we got naturally tired) was 26 hours long (including 8 hours sleep).  

    If you travel 100 km away, you probably need to evaluate more detailed weather to plan multi day trip. Something that you hardly fit to the watch. The watch is good for the easily accessible daily re-assurance how the next day will look like. 

    > I will file an enhancement request to update the system to provide 24h

    Thank you Travis. Really appreciated. Despite the fact it seems we don't agree on importance of it, I hope it will get finally through.