Show HN: SF Microclimates

10 pointsposted 11 hours ago
by weisser

21 Comments

meatmanek

7 hours ago

My favorite weather map for SF is PurpleAir: https://map.purpleair.com/environment-estimated-temerature-f...

There are thousands of sensors around the city. You can get a sense of shade-vs-sun temperatures by the spread of numbers you see (on cloudy days, the reported temperatures will be much closer together, while on sunny days, sensors in the sun will report elevated temperatures.)

You do need to make sure to disable indoor sensors, and keep in mind that some sensors are faulty. (I've seen some that have been reporting a constant temperature for years.)

why_at

6 hours ago

This one is neat, I might actually use it.

I don't understand why it includes indoor sensors at all let alone by default. Why would I want to know the temperature inside some random building?

weisser

6 hours ago

> I don't understand why it includes indoor sensors at all let alone by default.

Add location_type=0 to only get outdoor sensors

fragmede

5 hours ago

or just click the buttons that accomplish the same thing. The point is someone at PurpleAir is asleep at the wheel if such an obvious default configuration isn't being set. If they can't get such a basic thing right, why do we trust anything else from them? "Anything else" specifically including "running their software on a raspberry pi inside my home network".

650REDHAIR

6 hours ago

I use that and Mr. Chilly.

Mr. Chilly is one of those niche apps that sparks joy and reminds me of the early app days.

weisser

5 hours ago

This was directly inspired by Mr Chilly which was designed by my friend Anna Bleker.

It's an excellent iOS app: https://mr-chilly.com/

My goal was to do something similar as a Claude Code skill

why_at

6 hours ago

It seems weird to me that there's no human readable version on the webpage?

Usually what I want the weather for is to choose what to wear, not to put in a bash script or an LLM or something.

weisser

6 hours ago

I made this primarily to use inside Claude Code in terminal but maybe I'll make a little demo on the website if you put in an SF zip code.

forthwall

5 hours ago

An interesting problem with self-reported temperature is that people just put their outdoor sensors inside for some reason or near an ambient heat source; also in neighborhoods with tall buildings, it's a bit colder higher up, so the balcony readers are a bit off from sidewalk temperature, it is interesting to see though that one block from another is super different in temp, is it because it's actually different or is there something heating/cooling the sensor off randomly

lukevp

6 hours ago

This happens in Portland as well! Can this be adapted/updated to work here?

weisser

6 hours ago

Fork the Github! Would love to see it elsewhere :)

spicycorncheese

7 hours ago

Is it possible to get individual sensor data via this API?

weisser

6 hours ago

no I made this primarily for a Claude Code / Clawdbot skill so I am not making it super sophisticated.

You should use Purple Air if you want to make it more focused https://www2.purpleair.com/

baby

6 hours ago

Can you do celsius

x3n0ph3n3

5 hours ago

Multiple neighborhoods have no data, including Lakeside and Stonestown.

weisser

5 hours ago

Good flag. I've just added add fallback to the nearest location with a sensor to the repo.