Weather2U
October 25, 2008
I’m just not sure what to make of Weather2U at the moment. One of the articles on their homepage is just made up of random characters (I guess this is because people can submit articles in their own language, but I’m not sure about the point of a multilingual site?) and once every 5 minutes for the past week or so the entire site has just given a “Service Unavailable” error. One of the key criteria for a weather data provider is trust that they’ll be consistent with their provision of data and I’m just not getting that vibe!
Next, they aim to update the weather up to 4 times a day, but on the f.a.q. they say this might only happen once a day. Also, they say they “number crunch” and “decode” the data that comes from the National Weather Service, well, I guess you’d need to find out what that means as the source data is just the source data, right? And why wouldn’t you go straight to the source?
The look of the Weather2U website when it works however is excellent. If you just want to view weather forecast information online then it has well presented data (check this link out for London) and an easy to navigate interface. I’m not sure what the 300 day forecast is all about though, seems a bit ambitious!
If you want to use the Weather2U data for your own application or website… then be prepared to pay… As of October 2008 the following charges were levied for the data (available for up to 180 hours in the future)
0-1000 Requests per month – £9.95
1000-100000 Requests per month – £29.95
100000+ Requests per month – £79.95
You need to spend some time with a calculator and work out how many locations you’re interested in weather data for… as if you get 4 data inputs a day for just 50 locations then you’d be spending ~£359 a year… for this cost you’d need to look hard at the value add that Weather2U are adding to the original National Weather Service data.
Overall Weather2U provides exactly what you’d want for a weather data provider, long term forecast data, lots of locations, well formatted data…. but this is tempered by the unreliability of the site, long term costs and an outstanding question about the value add of their data over and above the National Weather Service. We’ll have to keep a close eye on the site!
