Enjoy NOAA’s data while they still have funding.

I also like the pure NWS data, and will take a moment to shill Deep Weather on iOS, which provides a nice, easy interface to the NWS products for an area.

I made a val to clean this up a little better: https://www.val.town/x/greg_dryke/nwsForecastDiscussionWeb

The `<pre>` on the NWS site was really messy on mobile, this is nice and neat. Feel free to fork it and use your own, or this link should work for your NWS site too!

https://greg_dryke--0816a61c279c11f09d52569c3dd06744.web.val...

(No promises on possible future changes if you do start using it, but it's pretty stable.)

I'm not Australian, and moved here a year ago, but the obsession with the BoM is... odd? As an outsider, I see a website that's a mess from the early 2000s, and weather forecasts that just aren't very good (neither accurate nor detailed?).

An event I was recently supposed to go to was called off because the BoM forecast rain all day 3 days out. Google Weather said it would be dry and sunny. It was dry and sunny. It's an anecdote not data, but so far I'm not understanding the national obsession based on this and a few other personal experiences.

> I love the BoM.

You have no reason to. They're not a well-run, efficient organisation, even by government department standards.

> over http:// urls because of the overhang of farm equipment which can't handle TLS https: connections.

This is the public narrative, and is a brazen lie.

THERE IS NO SUCH FARMING EQUIPMENT!

Certainly not in 2025.

Their site DOES HAVE a certificate, and supports HTTPS, right now.

They just refuse to let you use it, redirecting a successful HTTPS connection back to HTTP.

If there was farming equipment (Which models? Vendors? Affecting how many farmers?) out there they would be broken right now because port 443 is open and listening. If they can connect to port 443, then they don't need to be redirected back to port 80 because they worked. If they can only connect to port 80, then the presence of port 443 makes no difference.

I keep pointing this out, and "true blue aussies that looooove the BoM" keep arguing about this. The BoM spends hundreds of millions on IT, tens of millions on consultancies like Accenture, but they can't manage a $50 certificate and a bog standard HTTP/HTTPS endpoint.

My iPhone, right now, can't connect to most BoM web pages because of this stupid, stupid issue! There is no mystical broken farming equipment, but there definitely are inconvenienced users like me!

After putting up this rant for years and years in various forums, a former BoM employee finally fessed up -- they were the one that tried switching HTTP to HTTPS years ago and "broke" their internal systems. Not non-existent farming equipment, it was BoM's own internal services that fell over.

Why?

Because they hadn't updated any of it in decades, and the software was so old that it couldn't handle "modern" cipher suites and TLS versions. Modern being "newer than SSL 3.0"... in 2015.

That's not the sign of a competently run organisation worthy of admiration.

Environment Canada has hourly historical data for many stations. Some may be daily. https://climate.weather.gc.ca/historical_data/search_histori...

agree.

Even a site that displays 'just' recent weather specifics (sans how the forecast was) would be quite helpful.

e.g., the hourly precipitation for the last week or month.

Am NOT talking about generalized monthly climate data, fwiw.

Anyone?

Somewhat related: Before launching our new long range (5 day) turbulence forecast tool (for nervous flyers), we spent time experimenting to see how far out we could reliably predict turbulence. Once we had something promising, we started posting daily snapshots—each showing the forecast from five days earlier alongside what actually happened. The model updates continuously, and we’ve kept the process public to demonstrate how well it works, not just claim it does.

https://www.turbulenceforecast.com/drift

This NOAA National Blend of Models (NBM) viewer lets you enable observations and then roll back the forecast initialization date to see forecasts and observations at the same time.

It’s experimental, and selecting weather stations is a little clunky, but it has some really cool info that’s hard to find other places.

https://apps.gsl.noaa.gov/nbmviewer/?col=2&hgt=1&obs=true&fo...

Edit:

This GEFS plume viewer is cool, too.

https://www.emc.ncep.noaa.gov/users/meg/gefs_plumes/index.ht...

You can check a box to plot observations and then pick an older “cycle”.

Both are limited to the US.

I have wondered this for years. Several times I looked for a dataset of historical forecasts. It seems wild that with all the data available out there, there's no go-to source that has past forecasts together with the actual recorded data for each day. That said, these posts do mention some sources:

https://opendata.stackexchange.com/questions/2009/historical...

https://www.reddit.com/r/meteorology/comments/1crs6lu/seekin...

(These aren't "sites" that display the past data, just datasets you can download.)

Which makes sense depending on what the reach of the forecast is on geographical scales. In my country, you have 6-7 meteorological zones that needs predictions, but the forecasters would always say "area so-so will have rains", because those meteorological zones don't fit neatly into our administrative distributions. That also means that if a administrative area is split between two zones, is a 50-50 whenever or not the prediction will turn out to be accurate.

I've got an old foot injury that gets sore when rain is coming with surprisingly good accuracy