As one who wrote (over 10 years ago, still improving it) and sells a weather app targeted at storm chasers, weather enthusiasts and spotters... I find the NWS data to be fragmented, often based on ancient computing standards (look at how NEXRAD data is formatted - it's binary for a 16-bit computer), and very hard to find documentation on.
Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.
And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.
The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.
But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).
I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).
As the dev who set up the Pirate Weather source, I couldn't agree more. 90% of the challenge here was getting the grib files into a format I could quickly and easily access, since the provided format is about as difficult as it gets. I don't pretend to know more about the actual art of forecasting than NOAA, but wanted a better way to get the data they produce out there
Companies can add value by providing documented, consistent API's for data that, yes, is free from the government. NWS does not face the market incentives of a company, and it shows.
And yes, a bunch of companies take that data and hype it, but that's not particularly new - it precedes apps. I've long seen claims of forecast accuracy from private companies that are, well, absurd, given the limits chaos (and other issues) place on forecasting very far into the future.
The Big Data Project is a substantial improvement in terms of access, but the data itself is still in the legacy formats. Also, some data is not well suited for mobile access - it's in giant binary blobs (NEXRAD Level II) or requires multiple HTTP operations to acquire.
But... at least it's available and free (except for lighting).
I'm not talking about model data - I let others worry about that, and for personal use, I use sites like the excellent one from College of DuPage ( https://weather.cod.edu/forecast/ ). I've watched friends in the research and operational community describe their frustration at the decision process that went into GFS modernization, and how it was frustrating to see ECMWF beat it out in forecast skill (I'm not up to date on where that stands now).