Topic: WU - Let us know your issues

[antstrafer]

I am trying to  understand why whole numbers used with weather data on WU is such a big show stopper.  Most home weather instrument have a measuring error of + or -  .5 degrees. Yet the you want WU to report one or two decimal places.  I  would think some of the cheepo instruments have even bigger margins of error.  Add in the miss placement of the weather instruments, crappy radiation shields etc and I suspect the margin of error is pretty big.  Global warming is supposed to  hinge on a fraction of degrees. Some of you ODCers or rocket scientists prove me wrong.

Good question. But to add to what davidmc36 and Ray said...

Nobody is asking for 2 decimal places....we just need one decimal place. The problem becomes even worse for those using Celsius as 1 degree change equals 1.8 F as Ray said. That is enormous especially around freezing temperatures especially when tending to plants and water pipes..etc.

Accuracy and resolution (precision) are two different things. If sensors were only accurate to +- 1 degree then why are manufactures adding in a resolution of 0.1 degrees? The answer is because there is a consistent error. So it is beneficial to report with higher precision even though the accuracy may be off. Your thermometer is consistently going to have a trend to read high or read low. But you can compensate for this and you can do calibration adjustments!

My cheapo weather station temperature sensors only have an accuracy of +-2 deg F but it still reports temperature with one decimal place and the trend is consistent even if not accurate. There is a difference between accuracy and precision. But I've compared my temperature sensor (after calibration) with my $386 Fluke multimeter thermocouple thermometer and it is pretty accurate despite the specifications.
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=36045.msg369710#msg369710

Another reason is that it messes up dew point calculations and graphing.

The same can be argued for wind.

True, but with instrument anomalies, site anomalies and such, any decimal representation presents a false presentation of accuracy and precision but it presents an image users like to see, makes them feel like weather reporting is the real deal.   I am not saying don't report temperature to one decimal place, I am just saying know that that last decimal place to the right of the dot is an illusion in weather reporting.

[g4jnw]

Hmm there are some weather stations on the old map but nowhere near all of them, mine isnt on and my brother in law's isn't either, I recon about 10 missing, its a real mess. Wonder why wunderground hasn't replied to all of its customers.

[mdv]

A couple of things to be aware of when using the old site that is running in parallel with the new site:

1. It seems that only the dashboard is actually old-site. The forecast page seems to be a mirror of the new site forecast page, and if you try to navigate from the old site forecast page to the dashboard you will be re-directed to the new site dashboard.

2. I if you select any PWS on the old site dashboard map, you will be re-directed to the new site dashboard for that PWS. 

[mdv]

True, but with instrument anomalies, site anomalies and such, any decimal representation presents a false presentation of accuracy and precision but it presents an image users like to see, makes them feel like weather reporting is the real deal.   I am not saying don't report temperature to one decimal place, I am just saying know that that last decimal place to the right of the dot is an illusion in weather reporting.

As Galfert has said, it is as much about precision as accuracy.

The issue of using integers is most apparent if metric:imperial conversions are done using only integers for both inputs and outputs, and especially so if such conversions use 'flooring' rather than rounding (up or down). Now, I don't know at what point in the process of data conversion and data display, the WU software reverts to only using integers, but in the worst case scenario there might possibly be a discrepancy of 1.3 deg C (2.3 deg F) between what my PWS is reporting (in degrees to 1 decimal place) and what WU displays in my dashboard. It doesn't really matter if my PWS is not accurate to 1 decimal place - what counts is that WU displays precisely what my PWS has reported, which for me is a fundamental trust requirement for remote monitoring of my PWS and nearby PWS.

If you use degrees F exclusively, then you are not faced with this issue of conversion and loss of precision. But much of the world uses metric, and having data conversions using 1 decimal place becomes important.

[wxnut99]

I am trying to  understand why whole numbers used with weather data on WU is such a big show stopper.  Most home weather instrument have a measuring error of + or -  .5 degrees. Yet the you want WU to report one or two decimal places.  I  would think some of the cheepo instruments have even bigger margins of error.  Add in the miss placement of the weather instruments, crappy radiation shields etc and I suspect the margin of error is pretty big.  Global warming is supposed to  hinge on a fraction of degrees. Some of you ODCers or rocket scientists prove me wrong.

Good question. But to add to what davidmc36 and Ray said...

Nobody is asking for 2 decimal places....we just need one decimal place. The problem becomes even worse for those using Celsius as 1 degree change equals 1.8 F as Ray said. That is enormous especially around freezing temperatures especially when tending to plants and water pipes..etc.

Accuracy and resolution (precision) are two different things. If sensors were only accurate to +- 1 degree then why are manufactures adding in a resolution of 0.1 degrees? The answer is because there is a consistent error. So it is beneficial to report with higher precision even though the accuracy may be off. Your thermometer is consistently going to have a trend to read high or read low. But you can compensate for this and you can do calibration adjustments!

My cheapo weather station temperature sensors only have an accuracy of +-2 deg F but it still reports temperature with one decimal place and the trend is consistent even if not perfectly accurate. There is a difference between accuracy and precision. But I've compared my temperature sensor (after calibration) with my $386 Fluke multimeter thermocouple thermometer and it is pretty accurate despite the specifications.
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?topic=36045.msg369710#msg369710

Another reason is that it messes up dew point calculations and graphing.

The same can be argued for wind.

Well said. The final straw is that WU is taking away something we used to have (0.1C/F resolution)  It's like going back to standard def after years of high definition TV!  No thanks!

[galfert]

Re new look dashboard,  I personally will continue to use the previous version until such time that they get the new one finally fixed.  For info, previous version can still be found via https://horizon.wunderground.com/wundermap/ and selecting your dashboard from there.

That old site rocks. You don't have to start with the wondermap. You can start anywhere as long as your URL starts with "horizon." I was able to log in to the old site without being redirected. I can see the old station configuration pages too and the old webcam configurations. Forecast doesn't work as mentioned. But I'm happy with this. Thank you!

I'm not going to mess with anything there for fear of breaking things as any changes may not be compatible with the new database and may break things as WU is working on fixing the new site. I'm not even messing with configuration changes on the new site either.

So it seems that the old platform was called horizon. Or maybe it is called horizon now because it is being sunset (put out, going way, buh bye).

[rormeister]

Inasmuch as no one from WU has popped in on this thread for 20 some odd pages, I found a new supplier
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[galfert]

Inasmuch as no one from WU has popped in on this thread for 20 some odd pages, I found a new supplier

Not true. They chimed in on page 76 (5 pages ago or 6 days ago.) And I've noticed them reading this thread just yesterday and not posting (you can see it above who is viewing now). Also they have kind of taken disdain for this thread since there has been so much mud slinging. They have however been a little more active and informative in another thread and updated just 2 days ago. No link...you'll have to find it...and this goes for everyone...please don't sh*t in it.

[WSWeather]

Also they have kind of taken disdain for this thread since there has been so much mud slinging.

As one of the occasional slingers who thinks massive corporations should be held responsible for at least marginally getting a product right before releasing it, if they can't take the heat they should have just cut to the chase, killed WU off (like they're going to do anyway) and just moved everything over to weather.com (like they're going to do anyway).

Corporate apologists enabled the degradation of the site and are how we got to this point.

[Ray Proudfoot]

nope 86 posts      1 like

My mistake. But I stand by my argument that temps to 1 decimal place are required.

[Ray Proudfoot]

Take a look at this screenshot. Temps to 1 decimal place in F. RapidFire wind updates. Grown-up design. It works. What on earth possessed WU to change it? The only thing it lacks is the ability to choose metric or imperial for each measurement.

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[galfert]

Take a look at this screenshot. Temps to 1 decimal place in F. RapidFire wind updates. Grown-up design. It works. What on earth possessed WU to change it? The only thing it lacks is the ability to choose metric or imperial for each measurement.

Over the years WU changed hands several times. Once to The Weather Channel and then over to IBM. During this time it was a revolving door at WU. Lots of employees left and new ones came in.  The old crew were weather junkies. The new crew probably had corporate people that knew nothing about weather especially at the higher level, and they probably hired new coders that were just coders and not really weather people. Insert the usual corporate marketing clueless people and you have the start of a disaster brewing.

The old site was then left to be managed by new people. In some instances they lost source code (because people left with it). For other things when there was code it was poorly documented, making it extremely difficult to make changes, fixes, and updates. Often times fixes resulted in then other parts breaking. In late 2017 it was all falling apart and the wheels started to come off. This is not uncommon for poorly run IT things. You don't have to be an insider to know that this happened. But WU employees have mentioned all of these things (not all at once, but things have been said here and there with a mentioning of a thing or two on occasion). Myself having a career in IT, I've seen this many times in various consulting jobs even for some large companies.

So what do you do when you can't properly run what someone else set up? You start over so that you can begin to put your house in order and start delivering on what you've promised to deliver. 2018 was all about removing features and functionalities as a band-aid to many problems. This is a new beginning for WU and it was the master plan when things blew up in late 2017. Don't think of it as an upgrade, it's a newly awakened incarnation of WU. It is more like having lost your wife and business due to becoming an alcoholic and then going through rehab and then putting your life back in order.

When someone has been through AA you don't kick them in the pants. You help them and you are patient and you are compassionate.

You can't put all the blame in one place. It is easy to blame IBM and call them incompetent. Yes they messed up this roll-out...that they deserve to know. But how about the early WU owners that sold out the company. Maybe they are to blame too for mismanaging the transition and for losing people. How about the fact that source code was not well documented? Well maybe things were done that way because of fast company growth and there was no time to do proper coding. The fact is that different things happened to all form this big mess. Ever think to yourself that IBM bought WU and looked under the hood and found an old decrepit 1.8 L engine instead of a nicely maintained LS small block V8?

[DWIGHT123]

Take a look at this screenshot. Temps to 1 decimal place in F. RapidFire wind updates. Grown-up design. It works. What on earth possessed WU to change it? The only thing it lacks is the ability to choose metric or imperial for each measurement.

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bette4 than My garbage way off readings😂 yet Ambient weather is right on,on their dashboard.

[Ray Proudfoot]

bette4 than My garbage way off readings😂 yet Ambient weather is right on,on their dashboard.

Can we swap climates? I’d love those temps.

[DWIGHT123]

Hey I love the Rain and snow (one of the reasons I have a weather station) living in California coast we don’t get much of that Dow. Here😂😉

[rormeister]

Inasmuch as no one from WU has popped in on this thread for 20 some odd pages, I found a new supplier

Not true. They chimed in on page 76 (5 pages ago or 6 days ago.) And I've noticed them reading this thread just yesterday and not posting (you can see it above who is viewing now). Also they have kind of taken disdain for this thread since there has been so much mud slinging. They have however been a little more active and informative in another thread and updated just 2 days ago. No link...you'll have to find it...and this goes for everyone...please don't sh*t in it.

No mud slinging here...just popcorn 🤗

[firescar]

This is my first posting on this forum.  I see there has been much discussion (and teeth gnashing) over the changes to WU.   I have 3 Davis Vantage Pro stations uploading to WU, one of them for more than 4 years.   

I have to say, I do NOT like the new look, at all.  The designers have latched onto the false idea that the more gadgets, graphics, and space consumed the better.  This is almost always the wrong tack in communicating quantitative information.  One of the greatest of all-time scientific graphic designers, Edward Tufte, has a general rule:  Maximize the information to ink (or pixels) ratio.  https://infovis-wiki.net/wiki/Data-Ink_Ratio

The new look has embraced what Tufte has called “chart junk”.  That’s exactly what all those dials and gadgets are. The original simple tabular form was far better, not that it couldn’t have been improved on.

The designers of the new WU look should step back and study Tufte closely.  I doubt they will see my recommendation here or follow it, but there it is.

Meanwhile, in the spirit of constructive critique, I offer the following:
--I have soil moisture, soil temperature and leaf wetness sensors on all my stations, and I am disappointed to NOT see those readings in the new format.  They are in the old format.   Please, please being them back as options.
--We must be able to see the data graphed on YEAR time scales as well as monthly, weekly and daily.  The pull down menu no longer shows Year time scale viewing as an option.
--We must be able to easily download data at daily (at least) time resolution.  Download options seem to be gone. 
--I was hoping that new WU options would include showing air quality sensor data, such as Purple Air sensors.  I have two of them and it would be beautiful to have the option of having that data on the page.

For now, I’ll keep viewing the old format (Using lower case “id” in the old urls) and pray that the final version of the revised WU includes the above fixes, including ditching the space wasting graphics and gadgets (or giving us the option to use them or not).  I sincerely would much rather have the old version working as an option than the current very limited, problematic version.

[mdv]

Now I am confused.

Previously I had an issue where on my new site dashboard, the daily history detailed table was missing many wind direction readings whereas no such issue existed on the the same data in the old site.

Problem disappeared for a few days, only to return with a vengeance today. Wind data present on the old site is missing on the new site - 17/186 reports today so far. Why?

[noctilucent]

I have soil moisture, soil temperature and leaf wetness sensors on all my stations, and I am disappointed to NOT see those readings in the new format.  They are in the old format.   Please, please being them back as options.

I've pointed this one out a few times as well.  For people using WU for agricultural monitoring it's essential, and WU used to be one of the few online services that provided this, most others just do the basic temperature, pressure, wind, etc.

[mdv]

As much as I don't see the need for an air pressure widget with a barometer, if we must have one it should work. Many posters have said it is broken - but I think this is true only for metric users (such as me).

When I load the new site dashboard, all the tables and widgets first populate with imperial data, and then the display converts to metric.

When the imperial values are briefly showing, the barometer needle mirrors the numerical value, but as soon as the dashboard displays metric values, the barometer needle shifts to some random spot nowhere near the actual numerical value.

The barometer has two scales - imperial on the outside ring, and in bold text; and the metric scale (Hpa) on the inside ring but in very feint grey text (which is very difficult to read on a Hi Resolution monitor, and impossible to read on a smart phone).

As such the barometer widget tool is pretty much totally useless to metric users.

If we must have a barometer widget tool, perhaps it might be possible to code it such that for a metric user, the scales are swapped over so that the metric scale is on the outside and in bold text.

I live in hope that the WU Team take seriously the many deficiencies in the dashboard and forecast page for metric users - there is much more to it than merely converting numerical values from imperial to metric.

[g4jnw]

Mine has come back online today, its strange that the owners don't seem fit to notify its contributors.
I tried to send an email but it bounced and if it wasn't for contributors they would not have a service to sell.

With hindsight i would have bought an independent weather station thats not tied to wunderground, that way i could have controlled data.

Anyway hope now it does not drop out anymore as local anglers depend on the data before setting out on fishing.

[n4khq]

My weather station started working really well several months ago. Most of the problems were on my end. I have lost my Trello account; says it private and I need an invite. Is this the place to report issue? The new WU for my station KGADAHLO8 web page will not let me login in Using Safari on a Mac running Mojave 10.14.4; it takes me directly to https://www.wunderground.com. I have turned off Auto Fill and empty the cash and it still does not work. I can login with Google Chrome on the same mac without issue. If this is not the place to report issues, please give me the link. Thanks

[cbull23]

My weather station started working really well several months ago. Most of the problems were on my end. I have lost my Trello account; says it private and I need an invite. Is this the place to report issue? The new WU for my station KGADAHLO8 web page will not let me login in Using Safari on a Mac running Mojave 10.14.4; it takes me directly to https://www.wunderground.com. I have turned off Auto Fill and empty the cash and it still does not work. I can login with Google Chrome on the same mac without issue. If this is not the place to report issues, please give me the link. Thanks

I am having the same problem on Safari. I got logged out and now when I go to the login page, it redirects me back to the homepage. I noticed this when the upgrade first occurred, but the issue seemed to go away until now. Hopefully this is resolved quickly.

[g4jnw]

safari on my macbook air works fine, just tried it before replying

[galfert]

With hindsight i would have bought an independent weather station thats not tied to wunderground, that way i could have controlled data.

Most weather stations have limited places where you can send your data. But almost all of them are capable of being expanded to send your data just about anywhere you want. In your case you have a Fine Offset clone station. There are several ways to expand the capabilities of your console by having another device read its data to then send elsewhere. Two of the most popular solutions that would definitely work for you are Meteobridge and WeeWx. Read the various posts or ask for help in the following sub-forum.
https://www.wxforum.net/index.php?board=111.0