Experiments with Weather Data
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I had been wanting to try experimenting with nowcasting since the death of Dark Sky and finally got around to it. This application essentially became a playground for me to experiment with various weather datasets and geospatial visualizations.Some interesting concepts that came from it:The nowcast is using pySTEPS optical flow under the hood: https://pysteps.readthedocs.io/en/latest/auto_examples/plot_.... This library is super cool. It bugged me that every radar visualization just gave you choppy snapshots in time, so I spent some time working on building a smooth interpolation. The backend passes keyframes along with motion data from the optical flow analysis and then has a custom WebGL shader to do the interpolation which lets you scrub the timeline and have a smooth interpolation.The other forecast tiles and the main weather page are using the average of many different weather models. You can see every model that factors in on the models page: https://strataweather.com/models. This gives some indication of the divergence between models on the main page. Eventually I plan to score each model run and ensemble based on past performance (so you could say have a custom ensemble weight based on which models perform the best in your area). Haven't quite gotten around to that yet.The risk pages are using the last 14 years of weather data to identify natural hazard risks as a true probability of occurrence. So it formally defines what we mean by a specific natural hazard and identifies the probability of occurrence based on past data at each location. Some of the definitions need some tweaking but it's a neat visualization.Feel free to play around with it! It's running on a Hetzner box that I'm hoping will survive more users but we shall see!
HN · launched Jul 29, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 71%) · 1 view
Niche: environmental and geospatial analytics software · 124 launches, 14 in the last 7 days ▼ -7% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Energy & climate
- Analytics & BI
- Developer
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 124 launches in environmental and geospatial analytics software →
Could you build this?
Partial Building the Next.js geospatial UI is vibe-codeable, but implementing radar extrapolation nowcasting and transforming raw weather model grids requires specialized meteorological and GIS domain knowledge.
What it would actually take: The frontend can be built with Next.js, Deck.gl, or MapLibre GL. The hard part is the backend ingestion of raw NEXRAD Level 2/3 radar data, optical flow calculation (such as rainymotion or pySTEPS) for precip nowcasting, and processing GFS/HRRR GRIB2 datasets. An engineer with GIS, spatial data processing, and scientific Python experience is necessary to build the nowcasting pipelines.
Discussion
2 comments analyzed.
Feature requests: Longer playback/animation length for zoomed-out views, Default zoom level adjustment for better motion visibility
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 198 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #178 of 199 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 261 days after the earliest competitor.
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- Slow Weather: 3D Forecast · ph · 2026-10-09 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- SolarStorm · hn · 2025-12-10 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.49
- WebGCM · hn · 2026-09-21 · 6 upvotes · similarity 0.48
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