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Weather Forecast Tracker

Dockerized service that tracks how NWS forecasts drift over time

Screenshot of Weather Forecast Tracker — Dockerized service that tracks how NWS forecasts drift over time

Tech Stack

PythonFastAPISQLAlchemyAPSchedulerDocker

About This Project

Overview

Weather Forecast Tracker polls the weather.gov API on a schedule and stores a complete 72-hour forecast snapshot for each configured location on every cycle, instead of overwriting the last one. A FastAPI layer exposes a forecast-range query that shows exactly how much the predicted temperature for a given hour swung between polls — useful for measuring forecast reliability, not just reading today's weather.

Motivation

I was curious how much NWS forecasts actually change as the target hour approaches, and there was no easy way to see that — most weather apps just overwrite yesterday's forecast.

Lessons Learned

Storing full snapshots instead of just the latest value turned out to be the entire point of the project — the moment I started keeping history, previously invisible forecast drift became obvious.