4caster.net

This post is all about Metcheck, a website based in the UK that not only provides both free and chargeable weather forecasting, but also has interesting challenges for its community. At the time of writing the challenge is to try to predict the weather for London 5 days into the future! OK so the prize is only getting to the top of the leaderboard, but if you want to test any of your weather prediction software/algorithms out it’s worth a go!

More traditionally, Metcheck has a variety of forecasting options around the world (even oddly for up to 300 days into the future – something that sounds more fantasy than fact!). Not surprises here… Metcheck get their data from the site that we’ve covered a few times before – the NOAA National Weather Service! But their selling point is that they have experience of corporate clients and do take pride in not just providing weather forecast data, but linking it to key subjects that people are interested in weather conditions for – such as farmers and Formula 1 !

Metcheck Premium is their chargeable service, as of November 2008 this was £3.95 a month, approximately $6. For this sum you get access to more comprehensive forecast data, archive data for the UK, live data and more.

Really situated as a weather data service provider rather than focusing on raw data, Metcheck is a well established business with many topics of interest.

Well the title sounds promising!  rssweather.com unsurprisingly provides a feed of data to your RSS client from a large number of cities around the world. It’s got an extremely clean and simple to use interface helping you get to the country and city you’re interested in very quickly.

Unfortunately there is no raw data access directly from the rssweather site and extracting the data you require from the rss feed would not be allowed I’m sure! However what is most interesting about the site is that it is powered by HamWeather – a site that we’ll be covering in some detail in the future!

Overall, rssweather is an excellent source of well presented weather data…. but for your RSS client only.