Current weather icon not changing with PWS

I think this might have been asked before but thought I would throw this out there before I invest in a PWS. If I select a PWS, the icon that shows for the current weather status continually shows sunny. Event when its night, it still shows sunny. Why is this not changing? Regardless which PWS I select and what the current weather is like in the area of the PWS, it constantly shows sunny.
If the Iro is pulling data from the PWS I would think it would pull this as well. If its gathering it from Aeris should do the same.

Thanks for the help!

Yeah, I can confirm this as well, as I am seeing the same thing. Today it was raining all day and the app displayed the sunshine icon the entire day.

Thanks for reporting this, will take a look at the data coming back from our Weather Provider.

:cheers:

It looks like for the observation data request for the particular PWS being used, no weather icon data is being returned.

I’ve opened a ticket with our weather provider and will relay their response.

Thanks!

:cheers:

From our weather provider… Looks like they are working on a solution.

AWTony (AerisWeather Support)
Aug 18, 7:10 AM

Franz,

This is not a bug but due the specific weather station not providing weather or cloud information. Normally when this occurs, the data ingestor will pull information from a nearby official station that does have weather and clouds information. I will need to verify the exact distances, but I believe it looks at stations within 10-15 miles max. In this case there was not a nearby official station to take this information from.

Our team has been looking at various solutions for this for future implementation so that we may provide a weather component even for personal weather stations that we currently do not have weather information for.

Franz - I emailed Kevin some screen shots last night that will show that no matter what PWS you choose, the weather icon never changes and remains on sunny.
As far as the regular weather stations, I’ve also seen that it would be raining and the icon still shows cloudy, etc.

@jsc1205 Are there no official stations within 10 - 15 miles? It sounds like if that’s the case it just defaults to sunny. For me, selecting my own PWS has shown variation. Right now, it’s just showing fog (I think that’s what this one means) which is what I’d expect around here. I’ve seen it show other things though. I also do have an official station within 10 miles though.

It’s also possible you have a caching issue where you choose a different station and it doesn’t really update the images. Have you tried switching stations and then restarting the app or refreshing the webapp?

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It definitely seems to be PWS related. I tried closing and reopening as well as refreshing the app. Then I tried switching to a couple other PWSs, a few miles away, and then back to mine and it it never changed from the sunny icon even though it is raining/cloudy today. The only way I could get it to change was to switch to a NWS, at the airport, and then if finally changed to cloudy.

One other thing to note is that I have a Netatmo and the other PWSs I switched to are a Oregon Scientifc and an Acurite 5 in 1, with the same issue.

Same here, it’s been stormy all week and no matter which PWS I select, it’s always sunny even in the middle of a downpour that flooded streets.

@jimB34m, interesting feedback.

@jsc1205 and @lkbatizy, could you test a NWS (National Weather Station) and see if the icon changes?

I have tried just about every PWS in my area here in San Antonio and the icon does not change at all. Remains as the sun icon no matter what the weather is.
As far as the national weather station it changes but noticed that it’s off. For example it would be pouring rain and the icon shows cloudy or partly cloudy…
I sent Kevin screen shots in an email

The PWS (2.4 miles away) showed this:

The NWS (5.9 miles away) showed this:

Any idea on where we are at on this and getting it resolved? I’m putting off purchasing a PWS until this gets fixed.

Thanks!

I pinged our weather provider regarding this response, and will let you know if there is a time frame for a fix.

:cheers:

Here is their response, sorry couldn’t get you a better estimate on delivery.

Franz,

I currently do not have a time frame available. This is something that our team continues to review and have on our road map, but the teams have not yet tied to a specific release with a date associated.
I will inquire once more internally, and let you know if there is any additional information.

I reported this problem when i first setup my Netatmo to use as a personal weather station.

Since the reply that it was due to the PWS provider and I am using the Netatmo - MeteoWare Plus - PWS - Rachio integration to get my PWS data I just ignored it and moved on. But since I saw this post today I took a look at my dashboard and noticed that I am now getting the proper weather icon and forecast in the Rachio App.

Not sure what changed…

Hey good news! The great folks at Aeris are making a lot of progress on this…

Aug 31, 9:03 AM

Franz,

I have a great status update for you. The team pushed out several bug fixes and improvements to our observation data ingestors, of which included several updates for the weather and sky fields for MID_xxxx and PWS_xxxx stations.

The matching with nearby official stations has been improved and many more PWS will now include the weather and sky information. The station that originally prompted your support ticket now is returning this data:

http://api.aerisapi.com/observations?p=PWS_FXHBRWX

Also there is a new field “skywxSrc” which defines the official station ID that was utilized for the sky and weather conditions. By default the system will use the nearest official station, within 10-15 miles. The team also added the ability to define the official station to use with an individual PWS. This features was added due to the fact that the nearest station may not always be the best to match, especially with elevation differences . So over time as we perform verification and receive input from our users, we can adjust the correlation of PWS to a nearby official observation station.

Note, that even with these improvements, not all PWS will have a nearby official station. These PWS will still return “null” for the sky and weather conditions. Long term, our team is looking at implementing an “estimated” observation system, which use a combination of the PWS observation, satellite data, temperature and precipitation data etc to estimate sky and weather conditions. This ability is still several weeks away and may go through a beta period before being added to the official API.

AerisWeather Support
http://support.aerisweather.com/

:cheers:

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