Weather

Designs for a simple, integrated weather application.

Contents

Weather

Goals

Would be really cool to have a nice GNOME 3 weather app that would:

display current conditions
display forecasts
show radar maps
notify on hazardous weather conditions

Constraints

Weather data is provided by the Norweigen Meterological Institute (Norweigen-only API docs).
- We are required to include a link they specify, which indicates the origin of the data. For example: "Weather forecast from Yr, delivered by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute and the NRK".
- This page lists all the weather states they use, as well as the symbols for each one.
- What they provide:
  - Hour by hour forecast. Includes the following:
    - Links to their own forecast pages
    - Date/time of last update
    - Date/time of next update
    - Hour by hour forecast information, starting several hours from now and covering the next 48 hours, including:
      - Summary. For example, "partly cloudy", "heavy rain showers and thunder".
      - Precipitation in mm (expected, minimum, maximum)
      - Wind direction in degrees and compass code
      - Wind speed in mps and a named value (for example, calm)
      - Temperature
      - Pressure
  - 10 day forecast. This includes:
    - Links to their own forecast pages
    - Date/time of last update
    - Date/time of next update
    - Sunrise and sunset (presumably for today)
    - 10 days of forecast data, broken down into 6 hour periods for night, morning, afternoon and evening (00:00 - 06:00, 06:00 - 12:00, 12:00 - 18:00, 18:00-00:00). Each includes:
      - Summary. For example, "partly cloudy", "sunny".
      - Precipitation in mm (expected, minimum, maximum)
      - Wind direction in degrees and compass code
      - Wind speed in mps and a named value (for example, calm)
      - Temperature
      - Pressure

Potential use cases

How do I need to get dressed tomorrow?
Do I need to take my umbrella this morning?
Will I enjoy this outside party tomorrow evening?
Do I need to put the car in the garage or can I leave it outside?
Should I go to the beach this weekend ?
It has just stopped raining. Is it safe to go out?

Relevant Art

Lots of good examples out there that we can learn from.

Weather Channel

Wunderstation

Yahoo Weather

Aero

Window 8

Miui 6

Weather Timeline

Forecast HD

GNOME Shell Openweather Extension

Discussion

Might also be interesting to use the same list of locations as the system clock. Need to figure out how those locations are set.

Tentative Guidelines

Comments

It's likely that users will enjoy having a forecast on a longer period than 10 days. However, according to specialised websites, Forecast precision is very low on such a long period. Forecast are very precise on a 24 to 48 hours period
Please consider "tracking severe weather advisories" as a use case. In normal use, you don't need very frequent updates, and you'll likely only look at the weather app briefly before closing it. When in your basement with the tornado sirens going off, you want up-to-the-minute details.
A possibility would be to have different level of details, corresponding partly to precision of forecast (24 or 48 next hours (by 3 hours), 10 days (by day), more (by day)?).
The user might be able to "zoom" in a timeline from a level to another in order to navigate. When the period displayed get's longer, graphs and maps could allow to understand and make sense of the evolution of weather through this period.
Data should be displayed in order to allow the user : to compare and make sense of them using last days weather, to give precise data by absolute value and precise artwork, to make relation between different weather conditions.
The necessity to give fast and easy access to important data (temperature, rain, then wind) shouldn't prevent from displaying more precise information (when, how long will it rain, will the rain be thin etc.). LucGuillemin