Weather Underground stations not updating

I stay in Somerset West, Western Cape, South Africa. Recently the weather station I use stop updating. When trying to to change to another station only one, Strand is available. No other station that use to be there is missing. The one that I used Parelvallei, is also missing.
Using latest program version, 7.2.225.
Please advise.
Regards.

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I have the same issue here in New Jersey. Last night, the weather station I’d been using for years suddenly stopped displaying the current temperature in the Windows Task Bar. The usual two-digit temperature display was replaced with “NA”. When I selected a new station from the interface dropdown menu, I was surprised to see not only was the station I’d been using for years no longer displayed as an option, neither did the 7 or 8 other nearby stations I have as alternates appear.

I’m currently left with a station about 4 miles from my home. Not too bad, considering. However, my main station which no longer shows as an option is located 6 blocks from my home.

So I’m in the same boat as you are. I guess we’ll just have to wait for Mike to explain.

Same here in Christchurch, New Zealand, a lot of local stations have gone, which I had been using these past 10 years?

At first thought, I figured the missing stations were simply offline and therefore not reporting data. However, when I clicked each link to those individual stations, they were all up and running normally.

No idea what to make of the issue, but it seems to be a WW issue as far as I can tell.

As of today 03-Feb-2020, I have lost all the weather stations for 25177 and most of the weather stations for 25302 in West Virginia.

Same problem here in SW Kansas, sites available in weather underground aren’t all showing up in Weather Watcher.

Weather Underground recently made changes to their system that:

  • Made security changes that are preventing some weather stations from uploading data. The affected weather stations aren’t appearing at wunderground.com either and those issues should be resolvable by the weather station owners.

  • Made other backend changes that are preventing most weather stations from being accessed in their older (discontinued) APIs.

Over the past year, Weather Underground released a new version of their weather API (the only supported version today). In order to access it, you must obtain an API key by doing one of the following:

  • If you upload weather data to wunderground.com, you can retrieve your personal API key here. Each API key is able to make 1,500 calls per day (with a maximum of 30 calls per minute). For what most people are doing with weather data, that should allow a single API key to be shared in several apps (or between several people).

  • Weather Underground also has a paid “enterprise-grade” plan. This is the only available plan that someone like myself could use in an application like Weather Watcher.They describe the plan as follows:

    “The Weather Company’s robust suite of enterprise-grade APIs are designed to transform data into insight for commercial clients across industries. These solutions can scale to meet the unique requirements of your business with opportunities to purchase additional premium support as needed.”

    The plan starts at $850/month and goes uphill from there based on usage. For an application like Weather Watcher, I’d probably be in a pricing category that would force me to charge Weather Watcher users at least $29/month just to cover the cost of accessing weather data from this new API. And that’s of course assuming the majority of Weather Watcher users would be okay with this new monthly subscription price.

Since IBM purchased Weather Underground (via The Weather Channel), they’ve been moving toward only making their weather data available to large businesses. While unfortunate for small businesses like Weather Watcher, I can see how collecting larger sums of money from a smaller group of people will make life easier for Weather Underground (assuming their only goal is to make money).

For the upcoming release of Weather Watcher, I’m going to add a new field in the Weather Watcher Options to enter the Weather Underground API key. That will allow Weather Watcher to access the currently supported API. If that key is set, you’ll be able to access all of the Weather Underground stations that are available at wunderground.com.

Also, I’m looking into some other options to expand the number of weather stations available in Weather Watcher. Ideally, I’d like to find services that offer live conditions from weather stations located at specific points (so their locations are known and can be displayed on a map). Feel free to share any suggested weather data sources below.

Lastly, I created the Weather Station Network (nothing to see yet) to start collecting my own weather data. Many of the consumer weather stations are hard coded to upload to Weather Underground, so getting them to upload to alternative sites (like the Weather Station Network) is one of the largest challenges I’ll need to tackle with this new project.

As far as other options are concerned, please look at Top 6 Best Free Weather APIs to Access Global Weather Data (Updated for 2020) - especially OpenWeatherMap API looks promising.

BTW Weather Underground relies on Personal Weather Stations which, IMHO, don’t provide reliable data. Local stations can show incorrect temperature, wind speed, other data, which largely depend on weather station location. Personally speaking, I don’t miss WU. I miss high station number though.

I reviewed these as possible sources in the past. Here are my thoughts on them:

  • OpenWeather, AccuWeather, Weather2020: Seems to only offer current conditions for an entire city (instead of a specific weather station).

  • Weatherbit: Current conditions are updated every 15-30 minutes (on average). They do maintain a list of available weather stations, so it would be possible to display them on a map.

  • Dark Sky: I’ve used this API before and I really like it for retrieving precipitation data. Their API does not reveal the location where the current conditions were collected.

  • ClimaCell: Seems to only be able to access government sources of weather data (like NWS).

Is anyone interested in retrieving current conditions from any location within a city? Or do you prefer to know the location of the weather station that’s reporting the data? I personally prefer the latter (that’s why Weather Watcher works like it does today).

Yes, they do get most of their current condition data from personal weather stations. The bonus is that you can see where those weather stations are located and there are often others nearby if a particular weather station isn’t reporting great data.

The weather stations for 25177 and 25302 appear to be all back up and running as of 04-Feb, 11 PM.

Many of the weather stations are back online in my area too. There are still a small number that are missing though.

All weather stations are back on line in my area. Western Cape, South Africa.

Thanks for a great service.

Regards

LRB

What actually has changed causing some stations coming back?

BTW in Poland not all stations returned at the moment.

I’m not sure. Nothing on my end changed.

when I upgraded my computer - the ones that I had used - have still not come back on.

Which weather stations are you trying to find?

You and I discussed this about 7-10 days ago when you were trying to help me get any stations to register on a install on new machine - still having same problem, cannot get any of the stations that I use to get - if they are personal - station says weatherunderground - personal weather station - even the ones that are WU and weather station type can be WU or Personal and doesn’t matter can’t get a lot of them reset up on new clean system - even without firewall turned off.