Weather...or Not

Weather or Not is a web application designed to provide the user with only the information they need to go about their day unencumbered be dampness. Communicating with the Dark Sky API through it's custom server hosted on Heroku, weather or not recieves back forecasts and parses them for you to determine whether there'll be weather. If there's rain in the forecast, the user is alert by an image of an umbrella, if rain is not predicted, the user is greeted by a smiling cartoon sun.

While the Dark Sky API provides excellent documentation and powerful information, on of the great challenges of the project was preparing information in such a way that it could be processed by Dark Sky. For this client side of the appliation, this involved passing functions as props in order to gather the necessary information from child components. Much of the heavy lifting however, existed in the weather-or-not-api itself, the deployed version of which may be reached here.

Perdicting the weather is...well...a science

Not being a meteorologist myself, no small part of this project was determining how to deliver the most accurate prediction to the client as to whether they need their umbrella or not on the day. Originally, this would be a simple task, I would take the Probabilty of Percipitation that came back from Dark Sky and, if it was above 50% return true for needing an umbrella, and otherwise return false, however...

A word about PoP

Most people (very reasonably) believe that that percentage sign next to that image of rain on your weather app is the percent chance of percipitation- that is, the percent chance that you will leave your house and get rained on. However, the reality is much more nuanced. that % is, in fact, Percent OF Percipitation or PoP and it follows a very specific formula:

PoP = C x A where “C” = the confidence that precipitation will occur somewhere in the forecast area, and where “A” = the percent of the area that will receive measurable precipitation, if it occurs at all. - Matt Hardigree, What It Really Means When There's A 50 Percent Chance Of Rain - Gizmodo.com

So the next time you think to yourself,

I'll leave this umbella at home, there's only a 30% chance of rain today,

check yourself. Given this formula, a forecaster could be 100% certain that rain was going to fall on 30% of Boston and, although that's only a 30% PoP, 30% of Boston would definately need umbrellas on that day; and I wanted to make sure that they were covered (...so to speak).

Enter Barometric Pressure

While PoP may depend on several factors, barometric pressure is a constant. Higher pressure (above 1014 millibars of mercury) means clear weather, while lower pressure (1009 Millibars and below) is an indecator of bad weather (though not necessarily rain). While making a rain prediction based off of PoP along tended to produce inaccurate results, using barometric pressure tempers the calculation. For example, if the barometric pressure is 1015 but the percent percipition is 55% I'm not going to tell you that you need an umbrella becuase the pressure is just too high for bad weather (probably one of those times where the forecaster is only 55% certain that rain will fall on 100% of the town). Conversely, if the barometric pressure is below 1008 mb or the PoP is above 50%, then it would seem more than likely that you'll need that umbrella on the day.

Future Work

With a basic proof-of-concept completed, work will begin next on refactoring the code that exists (which is not nearly as DRY as it could be) and building on additional features for the user. These would include:

• The ability to add preferences for different weather conditions to an account and to have those preferences update the forecast output accordingly. For example, a user could input that they would like to wear a sweater if the outside temp is below 50 degrees and weather-or-not would alert them to this need in the same way that it does the need for an umbrella.

• Improved accuracy - with the vast amount of information that Dark Sky returns from a GET request, more testing will need to be done to determine which datasets are the most accurate. Currently, Weather or Not uses the dailing summary to determine the forecast, however, this may change.

-A search bar rather than a drop down for searching for a city or state

Wireframes and User Stories

• Wireframes 1
• Wireframes 2
• 

User Stories

A User Can…

• Perform standard user authentication actions, included changing their password
• Can select the distilled weather report from any Massachusetts city.
• Can view whether or not they need an umbrella in the city of their choice without signing in
• Can add multiple locations to track in their account when they are signed in
• Can edit and/or delete these locations
• Can click on a location and have it reveal whether they will need an umbrella at that location or not.

V2

A user can…

• Add preferences to their account (temp when they would wear a sweater, temp when they’d wear t-shirt, etc.) and be provided information based on these preferences as relates to the weather.

• See the distilled weather report for any city in the country.

Technologies Used

• React.JS
• Javascript
• Git, GitHub and Git Hub Pages
• SCSS
• HashRouter

Installation

• To access the code for this application please fork and clone this Repository or download the files. From the command line run:
• npm install to install all dependencies
• npm start Start a server on your local host by running