The 3-day forecast said nothing about an API change…

GNOME Weather is no longer able to display weather forecasts.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration of the United States (NOAA) seem to have discontinued or amended one of their APIs, one that GNOME Weather uses.

Open the app and you expect to see an overview of current conditions and a concise 3-day weather forecast.

Not anymore. Instead, you’ll see a ‘Forecast not available’ error and little else.

Running the application from the command line reveals the following error:

GWeather-WARNING **: Failed to get METAR data: 404 Not Found.

The exact cause isn’t clear. I couldn’t find any publicly references (and recent) changes to any of NOAA’s APIs.

But something has, clearly, broken.

For an interesting read on how GNOME could have avoided this situation, For an interesting read on how GNOME could have avoided this situation, read this blog post By Daniel A

A quick Google reveals that it might be a change of domains that’s darkening the skies for GNOME Weather.

The entire ‘weather.noaa.gov‘ URL the app references shows a “Service Removed” error. GNOME Weather (or more specifically the library libgweather) uses this URL to fetch its METAR data. It needs to be updated to work with changes made to the domain structure for NOAA’s METAR delivery.

Broken URL means broken app — though it’s not the first time that a domain change has rained on libgweather’s parade!

Reporting the bug against the library Daniel Aleksandersen writes: “My logs first mention this yesterday at 00:08 UTC and it has been happening every time I open the app since. I’m guessing that a service change went live at midnight yesterday.”

Hopefully this issue can be solved promptly by patching the app to fetch and send at the right API endpoints.

With balmy weather here in the UK, I need to know whether a quick drive to the beach this weekend is a good idea or a bad one. Good job Linux isn’t short of weather apps, eh?

H/t to Daniel A.