NOAA Weather

This is the official weather plugin for Indigo. You may create as many “Weather Station” devices as you like. Each station will have a variety of device states that hold information that can be used in triggers, conditions, and on control pages. NOTE: some information may not be available for any given station - if the data isn't available in the NOAA data feed, the value of that particular state will be “- data unavailable -”.

NOAA stations are primarily Airports in the US, and those tend to have the most data. There are other NOAA stations as well but the data from them tends to be spotty at best. There is also a map you can use to locate other weather station locations. Why do we use NOAA data, which is only available in the US, rather than some other provider (like WeatherUnderground or WeatherBug)? Put simply, they either have severe restrictions on what commercial users can do with the data or they require licensing fees. Neither of which we're currently prepared to deal with. NOAA data is completely free and unencumbered. You may have heard that Google has a weather API - which is sorta true. It's not a published API and we're not big fans of using unpublished APIs (they tend to break with no warning).

So, for now, NOAA is the best solution for our official weather plugin. The data quality is very good and is likely good enough for many of your purposes. You can also search the User Contribution Library for other weather solutions.

The plugin's config dialog has a setting to allow you to configure the display of temperature information in the Indigo UI to one of four settings:

• Degrees F
• Degrees C
• Degrees F (Degrees C)
• Degrees C (Degrees F)

The second setting in the dialog allows you to turn on extra debugging information in the Event Log. Unless you're trying to debug a problem it's probably best to leave that unchecked.

The NOAA Weather Plugin allows you to create Weather Station devices. To create a new one, switch to the device view and click the New… button. This will bring up the device edit dialog. Select Plugin from the Type: popup. Select NOAA Weather from the Plugin: popup, and select Weather Station from the Model: popup. Click on the Edit Device Settings… button and you'll see the Weather Station Config UI. Enter the NOAA station id in the text box at the top. You can click on the “Find NOAA Stations” to have a browser window open to the NOAA webpage where you can start your search.

Once you've found the station ID and entered it in the text field, click “Save”. If we can successfully contact NOAA and get the station data, we'll close the dialog. If not we'll show you an error indicating that we couldn't get the station's data file. You should try another station if this happens or confirm that you entered the station id correctly. From time to time, the NOAA system may not be responding to API calls and, if you've entered the station ID correctly, you may need to wait and try again later.

There are three additional weather device types that can provide additional weather data – Alerts, Conditions, and Forecast data. These devices are based on more precise location information – your lat/long coordinates (or any valid coordinates you provide) – rather than being linked to a weather station (which may not be near by. The creation and configuration of these devices is very straightforward.

The current conditions device is meant to mimic the original weather station device as closely as possible. Linking your logic to these new device types should work, but if you decide to transition to these new device types, you should confirm they are working the way you expect.

You can trigger off of various state changes on a Weather Station (or Current Conditions Device) - like when the temperature or wind direction change. Some of these states don't make for good triggers but will provide some nice information on a control page.

Weather Station device types provide you with several device states that you can use in the Trigger dialog:

• Current Condition - The current condition in a word or two
• Current Condition Icon - The current condition icon - Indigo ships with “NOAA Condition+.png” and it's children, one for each condition that's returned in this field. So, in the control page editor, select this state and “NOAA Condition+.png” and you'll have a nice conditions icon (images provided by NOAA).
• Dew Point °C - Dew point in Celsius
• Dew Point °F - Dew point in Fahrenheit
• Dew Point String - Dew point in a human-readable string
• Heat Index °C - Heat index in Celsius
• Heat Index °F - Heat index in Fahrenheit
• Heat Index String - Heat index in a human-readable string
• Humidity - The relative humidity
• Latitude - Latitude
• Location - Location in human-readable form
• Longitude - Longitude
• Observation Date/Time - The last time NOAA updated the data. This field is in YYYY-MM-DD HH:MM:SS so it can be parsed by other software if needed.
• Pressure (inches) - Pressure in inches
• Pressure (mbar) - Pressure in millibars
• Quality Codes - For scripters to account for the relative quality of the various weather observations (JSON). This state is only available in Indigo 2022.1 and later. See below for what the codes mean.
• Temperature °C - Temperature in Celsius
• Temperature °F - Temperature in Fahrenheit
• Temperature String - Temperature in a human-readable string (i.e. “98.0 F (36.7 C)”) - this is the state shown in the “State” column for a Weather Station device
• Time Zone - The timezone as it applies to the observed location. This state is only available in Indigo 2022.1 and later.
• Visibility - Visibility in miles
• Wind Degrees - Wind direction in degrees
• Wind Direction - Wind direction description in something close to human-readable form
• Wind Knots - Wind speed in knots
• Wind MPH - Wind speed in miles per hour
• Wind String - A description of the wind in human-readable form

With Weather Alert Devices, the device's states will be blank unless there are active alerts. If there are active alerts, information on up to five alerts will be available. This information is provided for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon for the purposes of personal safety.

There are several device states available with the Weather Forecast Device, each having an index value keyed to individual days. Up to 14 days' worth of information may be available.

Beginning with Indigo 2022.1, the NOAA Weather plugin includes a new state qualityCodes. This state includes information (from NOAA) on the perceived quality of select data elements. An example qualityCodes state value is:

  {"temperature": "V", "dewpoint": "V", "windDirection": "Z", "windSpeed": "Z", "windGust": "S", "barometricPressure": "V", "seaLevelPressure": "V", "visibility": "C", "precipitationLastHour": "C", "precipitationLast3Hours": "Z", "precipitationLast6Hours": "Z", "relativeHumidity": "V", "windChill": "V", "heatIndex": "V"}
  

The various codes are as follows:

This information will give you some additional granularity with respect to how much you can trust the data. Accessing this data using a script is pretty straightforward.

  import json 
  
  dev = indigo.devices[12345678]
  codes = dev.states['qualityCodes']
  quality_codes = json.loads(codes)
  temp_quality = quality_codes['temperature']
  
  if temp_quality in ("X", "Q"):
      indigo.server.log("don't trust")
  else:
      indigo.server.log("trust")
  

Here's the plugin ID in case you need to programmatically restart the plugin:

Plugin ID: com.perceptiveautomation.indigoplugin.NOAAWeather

For usage or troubleshooting tips discuss this plugin on our forum.