Bonus Video: Extended Conversation with Daniel Fiordalis, Creator of Astrospheric
Added 2023-02-17 17:40:08 +0000 UTCMy latest video over on YouTube called Everything You Need to Find CLEAR SKIES is a deep-dive on weather forecasting for astronomy. If you've watched it already, you saw that the backbone of the video was a really in-depth Zoom call I had with Daniel Fiordalis, creator of Astrospheric. Even though the YouTube video is already long (1 hour), my conversation with Daniel ran for 2 hours and I had to cut out a number of interesting parts and demonstrations. So with Daniel's permission, I am uploading a very lightly edited version of our call here to Patreon. Have a great new moon weekend everyone -- hope you get some CLEAR SKIES!
~Nico
Comments
Thanks Nico. The entire interview was really interesting!
Mark Muller
2023-02-21 01:20:10 +0000 UTCNot in the short term. He uses mostly regional models that are N. America only and felt he could make a better service by focusing on that specific region. I did try to show some various tools including a global cloud forecasting tool at 26:10 in the youtube video, but it isn't slick as astrospheric to use, although I'm still fascinated by those 'meteograms' with the error bars.
Nico Carver
2023-02-20 16:33:18 +0000 UTCAh, sorry for the unexplained jargon Mark! API stands for "Application Programming Interface". Basically NOAA and other national weather services are giving away their model data for free on the NOMAD website that Daniel shows, but the format of this data is not easy to parse and turn into a weather app. So a 3rd-party company creates an API which takes the difficult model data and turns it into some easy to parse formatted code. Most of the weather apps are then getting their data from one of these APIs rather than the source (NOAA, etc.). Daniel's main complaint about this is it can obscure what model you are actually looking at. For example, an app might just say "Powered by Apple Weather" but apple weather is an API, not the model itself.
Nico Carver
2023-02-20 16:27:51 +0000 UTCI am only just into the beginning of the video, so maybe this will be answered further in, but what does “API” stand for, when talking about API services?
Mark Muller
2023-02-19 17:05:01 +0000 UTCSimilar thoughts here in New Zealand--I'd love it if we were included.
Oamaruastro
2023-02-19 01:13:20 +0000 UTCOr extend to Europe even???
John Silver
2023-02-18 16:22:01 +0000 UTCPity it’s only for North America. Haven’t committed to the show because I’m in Australia- can’t use it. Any plans to expand coverage?
David Verbossche
2023-02-18 12:13:50 +0000 UTCGreat topic especially the last few months. It’s been horrible.
Bill Stewart (AstroSeabee)
2023-02-17 17:41:34 +0000 UTC
