One thing that is (was) still missing in the template was some more sophisticated forecast. Well, that is no longer true! I would like to introduce the new plugin, which I called “Forecast comparison“. I am sure it will be quite useful and it is again something I haven´t seen anywhere else, though I many times thought I would like to have something like this. Read further to get to know all the features and how to install it.
So what does this new plugin do? When looking at forecasts on the web there is always a problem with deciding which service to use. There is several providers that show you the forecast and often the values differ substantially. So… wouldn´t it be nice to have them all lined up next to each other, being able to see what each shows? OK, but wouldn´t it be even better if you could then also retrospectivally compare these values with the reality measured by your station to see which one was the most accurate? Well if your answer to these questions was yes, then this plugin is for you!
The plugin comprises of three scripts, which however are linked with each other, let me describe them one by one. Also, there are some additoinal features available to you as admin, accessible with your admin password specified in config.php. Everything is easily visible on one easy to understand page with a unified design to make all services easily comparable.
Let me first talk about the general info that applies to all the scripts. All these scripts retrieve weather conditions from several servers. Some of them require an API key, some don´t. The important thing I want to emphasize right at the beginning is that they are all free and the daily limit of calls should not be an issue because all the scripts use data caching. The services available to you are:
– Yr.no
– Yahoo Weather
– World Weather Online
– Aeris Weather
– Forecast.io
– Open Weather Map
Some of them are available “twice” as they offer more detailed short-term forecast as well as long-term daily forecast (OpenWeatherMap and Forecast.io).
For some of them you already have a key, because it is used in other parts of the template, in that case the value from config.php is taken. Those that do not require API are not an issue. For some of them you will just need to go through a very simple registration process.
Scripts
1. Current conditions comparison
This script takes the current conditions reported by the selected services and compares them to the actual values that are currently observed at your station. In addition to various graphs and tables there is also a “score” assigned to each of these services, based on how accurately the data is (you as an admin have a possibility to control how this score is calcualted, I will mention that later in this post).
2. Forecast comparison
This script retrieves the forecasts from those services for your location. Your station in this case obviously is not included, as this is always future data. Again you will see graphs, tables and be able to see the differences in the forecasts. The forecasts differ only in the intervals, some offer daily data, some hourly. In case of the hourly you can specify the interval you want to use. This is set in the script, but those are only default values, which can be then changed on the actual page by the users themselves. If for example you choose a 3-hour interval and the service provides hourly data, the values will be averaged out and the averages from the three hourly values shown as one single value and in 3-hour intervals (in case of precipitation not an average but a sum of course).
There is however one more extra feature – only available to admin – a “save” button. What this button does is it simply saves all the data you are seeing into a log file, a “snapshot”. This is then very important for the last script.
3. Retrospective forecast analysis
At first sight, this script looks very similar to the previous one – except there is one big difference. In this case, you are first taken on a page with a list of all the available “snapshots” you created as an admin. This snapshot will have date and time of when it was created. You choose the one you want and it will take you to this last script, which will show you exactly the same thing as the forecast script – except it will not retrieve current data, but use the data saved in that particular log file instead. And, of course it will add the appropriate station values – so again – you have the great opportunity to compare what these services forecasted and what the reality was in the end. This will be presented to you in a form of graphs and tables, including deviations from the station values.
As an admin, you will see two changes. On the forecast script, if accessed as admin, you will see the save button to save that particular forecast (obviously we do not want users to save files to our server…). And likewise, if you access the page with the snapshot list as an admin, in addition to the link to use those values, you will see additional link, which will allow you to delete particular snapshots.
I could talk about this for quite long, but the easiest will be if you simply see for yourself how it works and so here are the install instructions.
Installation
The install is quite easy, but will require so make some settings in the scripts so please read the following instructions carefully.
1. Download the zip file, unzip it
2. Open the file current.php in a text editor and find the section right at the top, where you do all the settings.
Here is a general description of all the things that need to be specified:
Timezone – this is probably irrelevant, just leave it and use the timezone already specified in the config.php. This is important for the correct time synchronization of the data. The forecasts are always retrieved and converted to UTC and subsequently to your local station time, offset is calculated from this parameter.
Next you see a parameter which will determine the icons. All icons are available as day or night and you can specify the daily interval to be used as “day” or “night”. The first number is the hour when night starts, second one when day begins (make sure you use the 24h system). Last parameter of this first section is graph width – simply the number of pixels to be used for the height of the graph (default recommended value is 600).
Each service has a parameter called “show”, which defines whether you want to use that particular service in the first place. If you set this to false, you can ignore all the other setting for that particular service and it will not be shown on any of the pages. Use this if for example your location is not available and the closest place is way off.
Then you will need to specify the API keys for some of the services. You will see that for some, the script takes values from the config.php as default (you can change them, but I do not recommend creating several accounts). You can also specify caching time for each of the services, I recommend using 30 or 60 minutes, the data is not updated more often anyway and you want to make sure not to run out of the daily allowed number of calls available for the free account. Then, you have to specify the location to be used. This is very important. Some services might offer forecast for your particular place, in others you might have to use some close bigger city etc. This is something you have to find out yourself at their website and then enter this information here. One service uses latitude and longitude, which is taken from config.php as default.
The above parameters are basically same for all the scripts and so when setting up the other ones later, you can just copy/paste those that are the same.
The current conditions script has one more additional set of parameters. These are used for the scores. How the score is calculated is actually described on the page itself. These parameters basically determine, how much “weight” should be given proportionally to the various reported values. For example, you can specify that temperature is twice as important as humidity, by setting maximum score for humidity to 100 and temperature 200 etc. Read the “How is this score calcualted” text that is on the page itself.
Next you set up the forecast.php script. Basically you can copy/paste most of the stuff, there is just additional parameter for specifying the default forecast interval, which is loaded on the first access of that page, users can then change this themselves.
Last open the retrospective.php, where there is only a few parameters to set up, which again can be copied from the other ones filled in already.
The default landing page for this plugin is the index.php. This has links to all the other scripts. However, there is an alternative page, which is called the admin.php and looks exactly the same, exccept that it requires your admin password and the links that go from this page will take you to the same pages, but you will see the extra admin options – i.e. the possibility to save/delete snapshots or empty cache.
Direct way of accessing this page would be to put as your URL: admin.php?password=12345 (replace by your adminPass). However, an alternative option is to add a link in the admin section that will take you directly here. If you want to do this, go to your admin folder, open index.php and enter the following line of code where you want your link to appear (most likely at the end of the page):
<a href="../plugins/forecastComparison/admin.php?password=<?php echo $password ?>">Forecast Administration</a>
I hope I haven´t forgotten anything. If something isn´t clear, I am sure you will understand once you see the script in action and if you want to see it before setting up, simply look at the demo available at meteopage.com. The last script, the retrospective anaylsis, will obviously only become interesting after a few days, if you make a snapshot today, then you will have to wait before you can actually see the station data for the upcoming days. Also, when you load the scripts for the first time or when no-one looks at your web for more than the cache time, the page will take longer to load as the data will have to be retrieved from all the specified services.
Add a link in your menu.
I will also put a poll here on the blog and it will be quite interesting to see which service is the most accurate. Is there an overall winner in terms of accuracy? Are they all more or less the same? Is one substantially better in Europe and other in the USA and Canada? We will see 🙂
Enjoy
Saludos Jachym
The new plugin “Forecast Comparison” seems very, very interesting.
I had never seen a utility that could compare multiple forecasts with data from our station.
Each new plugin, brings a big surprise. 🙂
Thank you very much for these wonders:
http://kocher.es/meteotemplate2/plugins/forecastComparison_1.0/index.php
Javier
Hi Jachym
Great template and very informative. Thanks for that.
One question, it seems yr.no is included in The Forecast Comparison but not in the Current Comparison. Is that by purpose?
Thanks
Gert
Hi Gert,
yes… for a very simple reason 🙂 Look at yr.no – they only provide forecasts, nowhere on the site (nor the API) will you find current conditions.
Hi Jachym,
Please ensure you take the following as posative from me and not negative.
When I saw your current.php (Current Conditions Comparison I thought great a compare between my actuals and Forecasts by others for that point in time and when I looked at your code in current.php I felt that was the case as it stated Forecast throughout;
Quote:
// set up services
$yahooShow = false; // Yahoo Weather forecast
$yahooCacheTime = 60; // cache time for Yahoo weather in minutes
$yahooCity = “Franklin”; // name of the city to be used by Yahoo Weather
$aerisShow = true; // Aeris Weather forecast – API key required
$aerisID = $aerisID; // value specified in config.php taken by defult
$aerisSecret = $aerisSecret; // value specified in config.php taken by default
$aerisCacheTime = 60;
$aerisCity = “Franklin”; // name of the city to be used by Aeris Weather
$wuShow = true; // Weather Underground forecast
$wuAPI = “XXX”; // WU API key
$wuCacheTime = 60; // cache time for Weather Underground in minutes
$wuCity = “geeveston”; // name of the city to be used by Weather Underground
$owmShow = false; // show detailed 5-day forecast from OpenWeatherMap
$owmAPI = “xxxx”; // OWM API key
$owmCacheTime = 60; // cache time for OpenWeatherMap in minutes
$owmCity = “Brno”; // name of the city to be used by OpenWeatherMap
$wwoShow = true; // WorldWeatherOnline forecast
$wwoAPI = $WWOApiKey; // WorldWeatherOnline API key, value from config.php taken by default
$wwoCacheTime = 60; // cache time for WorldWeatherOnline in minutes
$wwoCity = “Franklin”; // name of the city to be used by WorldWeatherOnline
$ioShow = false; // hourly forecast.io forecast
$ioAPI = “xxxx”; // forecast.io API key
$ioCacheTime = 60; // cache time for forecast.io in minutes
$lat = $stationLat; // latitude of desired location (default is stationLat from config.php);
$lon = $stationLon; // longitude of desired location (default is stationLon from config.php)
UnQuote:
I know realise by your above post that is not the case, that your intent is to compare actual (PWS-Data) against Current Conditions Supplied by others, I personally feel that one cannot compare actual (PWS) conditions against Current Conditions by others as in many (if not most) others use known nearby Metar Data (which in many PWS cases, is too far away to be relevant) or they use their own forecast. I feel that the page should display Actual PWS against Forecast by others to eliminate that irrelevance and in turn make it more relevant to a compare against Actual v Forecast.
Hope that makes sense,
Kind regards,
Tony
Hi Tony,
Im not sure I understand your point. With regards to comparing your station data with forecasts – that is exactly what the third script does – the retrospective analysis. You save the forecast at some point in time and in the future load that forecast, which is shown along with the station data, that was later on really measured.
Jachym,
Can you please delete my api key from previous post.
regards,
Tony
You obviously did not understand nor read my post in detail,
Thankyou.
Hi Tony,
API deleted
No, I did read your post and I see your point, but let me just say how I intended this, but I will rather send you an email as it is very messy here…
Hi Jachym,
Another brilliant script, I too would only use WxSim if you could do it also the only other compare I do is against WU as they are closest to being correct for my local , however WU is the only function I cannot get working in this script. I already have WxSim/WU compare on my main site : http://hrvistaweather.com/wxacompareMX-include.php and used same Api Key but can not get it to work on yours, I also noticed it does not display on your site either.
Tony
Sorry I dont understand… what does not display on my site? I see WU forecast normally.
Sorry Jachym, missed that yes I see it now, but still not on mine. If this helps here is the forecast page on WU for my local: http://www.wunderground.com/cgi-bin/findweather/hdfForecast?query=-43.122%2C146.989&sp=ITASMANI45
Tony
Hi,
well it seems like WU does not have data for Franklin, but it takes it from Port Huon. So, what you should do is try to find a link that works, the format for the WU URL is like this:
http://api.wunderground.com/api/API KEY/hourly10day/q/COUNTRY/CITY.json
In your case, the country parameter should be “au” and for city you just have to try to see what WU has available
Thanks Jachym,
Brilliant now sorted (I knew it was actually Geeveston for WU Forecast) but found the city geeveston is case sensitive. Used all lower case – now works thanks.
Tony
In your spare time 🙂 could you add Environment Canada to the mix on this and also as a plugin for the template!
tnx
Hi Bill,
just checked Environment Canada, but I dont see any API there or forecast/current available in some useable format (ie. XML, RSS or JSON)
Was just on EC’s web site and for the closest city to me found
http://weather.gc.ca/rss/city/mb-38_e.xml
That help?
Hi, OK, well that is “usable”, but it doesn´t really give any detailed info. First of all it only specifies time as “Monday, Tuesday” etc., not giving a timestamp and also, it only gives one value for the temperature for the whole day, not even as a field, but as a text, which would require parsing it and won´t be reliable. Im afraid this cannot be implemented into the plugin.
Hi Jachym,
Would it be possible to add WxSim forecast into the mix?
Thanks.
Tom
Hi, I of course thought about this, but it would be quite complicated due to the inconsistency of those files, the dates etc etc. Im not saying “no”, it is just that this is something for maybe future update of the script.