OK, so I just want to clarify why exactly Im so negative about WU...
There are things which are subjective - I dont like their page design, the navigation etc. However, I understand this is subjective and others might like it, so this is not something I see as negative, it just makes me less likely to use their page.
However, then there are absolutely black/white things they do wrong:
1. the way they actually use the PWS data - at our institute, we also use interpolation, i.e. you use nearby station´s data to make forecasts, you base it on several stations nearby. However the problem is that you can never do it in an environment such as WU (and in fact Awekas does this as well). Why? Simply because many of these amateur PWS are very badly sited and provide inaccurate data.
Let me give you an example:
You buy a Davis station, site it 2m above the ground above grass cover, make sure data is as accurate as possible. Both your neighbors find it "cool" to have a station as well, but they are no weather enthusiasts so they buy NetAtmo, mostly because it looks nice in their living room and place the outdoor sensor either next to the outside wall (which is of course heated in the winter) or in direct sunshine, without proper radiation shield. Both these stations now send inaccurate data, which could be quite similar, but different to yours. Now which station do you think will be seen as inaccurate based on the algorightms Awekas and WU use? Yes, of course your Davis, because you are a minority.
My point is, such interpolations and data quality checks can only be done if you have reference stations, which you know are accurate and you can only compare between those. Neither WU nor AWEKAS have this. And the number of people who use stations as more or less just fun, is larger than the number of people like us, I can assure you about that.
2. support
Im very disappointed with the support WU provides. I will again give an example of what happened several times in the past. Now, I know it can be difficult to keep things working 100% of the time. Of course there will never be a bug-free SW, or 100% reliable server. I understand that. However, several times in the past, WU was down, something was not working at all. And the only communication channel in that case is their FB page because the site itself was down.
In an ideal situation, they would post something like "We know about the problem, we are working on it, we expect it to be fixed in.... hours" etc. Something along those lines. That would be the ideal situation and I would not say a word about it. Next possibility, which is not ideal, but acceptable, would be if they didnt post anything. I would simply think - yes, th are probably very busy working on it, trying to fix it, and dont have time to post on FB. Fair enough. However, what I see as extremely arrogant and unacceptable is that everytime this happened, their FB page was full of posts from other people asking what is happening. And they posted nothing about this, but instead, they kept on posting some, at that point absolutely irrelevant, info about weather around the world etc., completely ignoring all people´s comments/questions and hour later, another irrelevant post from them. This IMHO shows they absolutely dont care about their users.
Another example of this is that about a yr ago, there was a major problem with the Czech translation. The problem was in the phrase "rapid fire". In English, the word "fire" has several meanings, you can fire a bullet, there can be a forestfire etc. In Czech however, the word "fire" means just the actual phenomena. They probably used Google Translate so the expression rapid fire was translated literally as "rapidly spreading fire". This expression is shown next to the name of each station which uses it. Now as you can imagine, this is a major problem because most people using WU in Czech have no idea what the original phrase was and what it really meant. So in the summer it would be very misleading, people might have thought there is a forestfire nearby. In the winter they would think WU has gone crazy, showing fires at temperatures below freezing point.
I wrote to WU via their contact form, FB, Twitter, email... I tried all channels and never got any reply whatsoever. Nothing. Only when I then posted here on the forum about it, Ken, our great forum admin, knows some guy at WU, so he asked him and lo and behold, next day it was fixed - only showing that it was not a technical problem to fix it, it was just pure ignorance...
3. data accuracy.
Being someone who loves statistics and data accuracy, some of the techniqes WU uses drive me nuts. Example - a common scenario - imagine a day where most of the day it is overcast, lets say the temperature ranges between 20 to 22°C the whole day, only for a very short while in the afternoon, the clouds break and you can see the sun for about an hour, which causes the temperature to rise to about 28°C. Lets ignore night just for simplicity. So the daily min would be something like 20, daily maximum that 28.
Now what would you say is the average temperature for that day? I say it would be something like 23, slightly above that 20-22, due to the short period of 28. On the other hand, based on WU, the average temperature will be 24, and in some cases this difference will be even much larger. Despite the fact they have all your daily values, so they could simply calculate the mean the way it is supposed to be calculated (sum of all Ts divided by the number of measurements), what they do is simply use the middle value between daily min and daily max. This is again in my opinion very misleading and inaccurate.