Clear Outside Weather Forecasts for Astronomers

[Grant_FLO]

The timezone is taken from the forecast location itself and should already take into account DST - if you check the line at the top of the forecast it will show you the timezone and also the time the forecast was generated. If the forecast has just been generated assuming you are looking at a forecast for your current location, the generated time should pretty much match the current time.

Hope that helps

Cheers,

Grant

[FLO]

The ClearOutside weather forecast website for astronomers has now made over half-million forecasts for over 10,000 locations

Clear Outside has generated 1.8 million forecasts for over 36,800 locations. Thank-you for making it a success  

We have moved it to a larger, faster server and will release an update with some new features in the New Year. 

[Owmuchonomy]

Clear Outside has generated 1.8 million forecasts for over 36,800 locations. Thank-you for making it a success

We have moved it to a larger, faster server and will release an update with some new features in the New Year. 

Great news.  Please can you remove the iPad bug whereby every time i use it I get 'Failed to find current location'.  It does eventually find it but after restarting the App.

[Grant]

Great news.  Please can you remove the iPad bug whereby every time i use it I get 'Failed to find current location'.  It does eventually find it but after restarting the App.

That's the first time anyone has mentioned that bug, I cannot replicate it here - what iPad version do you have and what IOS version?

The current app isn't designed to even run on the iPad - it does but it's not perfect. We will be releasing a new version optimised for iPads, IOS9 and with some more features at some point in the future

[Owmuchonomy]

iPad mini and IOS 9.1.

Edited December 4, 2015 by Owmuchonomy

[Mogster]

Thanks for the great weather service and apps

Just a couple of comments/suggestions.

As someone with red green colourblindness I find the sandy colours and the green hard to differentiate between, the pinky red is OK. Making the sandy colour darker would probably solve the issue.

Quite often there seems to be a mismatch in the weather data with rain flagged but 0 clouds. Maybe the rain data is less detailed than the cloud forecast but it looks odd.

I notice that an option for clear sky "alerts" is incoming, is there an ETA for this?

[Grant_FLO]

Hi Mogster,

Thank you for taking the time to leave some feedback

You are the third person in the last couple of months to contact us about colour blindness - I have to hold my hands up here, it isn't something that crossed my mind when we build Clear Outside but, it is definitely something I will be looking at when I get an opportunity to work on the next update for it. My intention is to build a settings panel where people can use the unit of measures used (our most requested feature!) as well as choosing the colour scheme to use that way people with colourblindness can use a colour scheme that works better for them.

The mismatch between rain and cloud cover could be how the data is provided to us - the cloud data doesn't have any probability associated with it, where as the rain data has a probability and amount so it could simply be that it's either a very low probability of rain or, that it's 0% cloud on average over the course of the hour but, there could be a few minutes where there is cloud. We pay for commercial weather data but profess to not being weather modelling experts ourselves so must rely on the data we get provided.

Clear sky alerts is something still on my todo list but without a clear idea of how we are going to implement it - I am currently leaning towards a flexible system that would tie in with the settings panel I mention above - I suspect the tolerances at which people would want to be alerts, the frequency of those alerts and the quantity of alerts wanted will be different for everybody so I think we need to build a flexible system where people can choose the thresholds that matter for them in the locations they want to monitor, this will make it much more complex to build than the simple notifications I've seen on other apps but ultimately, it should be much more flexible and powerful which can only be a better thing for the people who use it. No ETA yet and the unit of measure and colour scheme settings will come first as these are requested more (and simpler to build!) - I also have a few other updates up my sleeve I want to get out soon too.

Definitely, watch this space!

[FLO]

Clear Outside has made over 2.1 million forecasts for 41,462 locations. 

We really didn't know if it would be a success when we launched it back in 2014 so we are chuffed to bits!  

Thank-you to everyone who is using and recommending Clear Outside 

An update is in the pipeline.... 

[Chris-A]

Clear Outside is a great app and worked seamlessly for me until the very moment I "upgraded" to Android 6.0. Ever since then the scrolling has become so laggy that the app is more or less unusable. From reading reviews on the Play Store it seems there are many recent reports of this, although no-one else has mentioned Marshmallow as being the cause as far as I could see.

Is this a known issue? I have cleared my cache by the way, which improved a similar lag with Chrome but has made little or no difference to Clear Outside.

[Grant_FLO]

I've had a couple of people mention this but I've not been able to replicate the issues myself. There doesn't seem to be a clear pattern and with many thousands of people using the Android app, it's a very tiny percentage that have reported issues so it doesn't seem to be a widespread thing.

I'll do some testing and see if I can figure out why it might be slow in Marshmallow in particular.

[BGazing]

great app, although i now know when not to believe it (like the last night, lol). if i may suggest anything, that is perhaps to look into the possibility of plugging some of the data available at meteoblue, such as seeing indicators, jetstreams, bad layers, etc.

https://www.meteoblue.com/sr/vreme/prognoza/seeing/%D0%91%D0%B5%D0%BE%D0%B3%D1%80%D0%B0%D0%B4_%D0%A1%D1%80%D0%B1%D0%B8%D1%98%D0%B0_792680

[FLO]

On 12 January 2016 at 14:49, FLO said:

Clear Outside has made over 2.1 million forecasts for 41,462 locations. 

Clear Outside is having a growth spurt! 

It has now made over 2.5 million forecasts for 49,110 locations. 

A huge thank-you to all those using and recommending Clear Outside  

[zicklurky]

Well done FLO!

Pretty sure I make up at least a million of those.

"Is it clearing?" No...

(2 minutes later) "Is it clearing yet?" No...

(2 minutes later) "How about now?" No...

I'm like a 5 year old on a road trip.

[FLO]

13 minutes ago, zicklurky said:

I'm like a 5 year old on a road trip.

[BGazing]

So true, I am refreshing it too often on days when I schedule my outbound trips.

FLO, any chance of adding some additional data? (see above)

[FLO]

22 minutes ago, BGazing said:

So true, I am refreshing it too often on days when I schedule my outbound trips.

FLO, any chance of adding some additional data? (see above)

I can promise there will be more useful data when we next update but I doubt Clear Outside will ever be the hostess with the mostess. We want instead to focus on data that is genuinely useful and make it easy to read. 

HTH, 

Steve

[Robp]

My only gripe with this weather forecast is when I open it up I always see this and get all excited:

Then I change to my location and I see this

I have been using this since you introduced it and it is still my go to forecast, Thanks FLO (please send some clear skies my way!).

[Stub Mandrel]

Put in your location, save it as a favourite and go to it first. That way it will show up green :-)

[BGazing]

On 03/09/2014 at 01:36, cloudnine said:

I'm a bit late to the party, but Clear Outside looks good. Not sure what I'll do with the ozone info. Does that impact visibility?

Martin

Just coming back to this question, I cannot find the answer to in in the thread or online. How is ozone value relevant?

[FLO]

On 7 July 2016 at 08:00, BGazing said:

Just coming back to this question, I cannot find the answer to in in the thread or online. How is ozone value relevant?

I think we put Ozone in because we had it available in the data we use

We don't have it in the mobile app and it doesn't play a role in the traffic light rating system.

I guess you could argue, more Ozone in the column above you would affect seeing but I don't know by how much or when/if that would be a real issue.

We will remove it completely next time we do an update.

[Stub Mandrel]

On 07/07/2016 at 08:00, BGazing said:

Just coming back to this question, I cannot find the answer to in in the thread or online. How is ozone value relevant?

Ozone is ground level ozone and it is valuable information for asthmatics - plus CO is handy as a weather site in the day too! Leave it in.

[cathalferris]

Still love the app and the site, regularly used.

Slight oddity noted today:

17th: Moon listed as "Waxing Gibbous" and 100% illuminated, 18th: Moon listed as "Full" and 99% illuminated. Full moon is 09.27 on  the 18th according to the Virtual Moon Atlas.

Presumably a corner case where the phase state is probably generated at one time of day and the illumination fraction at a differing time? 

Definitely not important in any way for me, just an interesting observation.

Edited August 16, 2016 by cathalferris
speelung meestaiks

[Stub Mandrel]

<Chicken Licken> The sky is falling! </Chicken Licken>

[Newboy]

I have just found this and can only say thanks a million for such a useful website.   Up to now I have been using the data on the met office website which is OK for the basic weather but your website has all the extra info you need all on the same site.

 

One point, I would echo the points made on colour blindness, I have red/green colour blindness, I can with practice distinguish the red and green colours on the site but they don't leap out at me.

 

Frank

 

[Peco4321]

Great site but forecast does not match, here's bbc forecast for tonight and clear outside forecast, both for East Yorkshire. What forecast do you use.