Our Tools page has a third tool, and it is the first one that looks out of the window. A small live card shows the weather at Sleneset: temperature, wind and gusts, where the pressure is heading, and the last 24 hours. The full version, with forecast, radar and seventy years of history, lives at wetter.fjerkroa.no.
Where the numbers come from
MET Norway, the Norwegian Meteorological Institute, runs a weather station at Sleneset, where we are based: SN80102 Solvær III, ten metres above the sea. Every ten minutes it records air temperature, wind and gusts; every hour it adds pressure, humidity and dew point.
The readings do not come to us directly. They go to MET first, which checks them and publishes them as open data (CC BY 4.0) through its Frost API, usually within minutes. Our server fetches them every ten minutes, together with MET's forecast, radar nowcast, warnings and ocean model, and writes one small file that the page reads. If a source fails, the page keeps the last good value and says how old it is.
Measured at our doorstep, published by MET, evaluated by us every ten minutes.
What the full site shows
Current readings and the three-hour pressure change, active warnings, radar for the next two hours, the next 36 hours and ten days ahead, sunrise and sunset, sea temperature and waves. A comparison card puts today, the last week, the month or the year so far next to every year since 2007, for temperature, wind and gusts. The site speaks Norwegian, German and English and installs on a phone like an app.
Seventy years of temperature
The station has predecessors close by: Nord-Solvær, with daily temperatures from 1954 to 1998, and Solvær-Sleneset from 1998 to 2006. Stitched together they give a temperature record for Sleneset back to 1954, measured against the 1991 to 2020 climate normal. The decade averages tell a quiet story: about 5.5 °C from the 1950s through the 1980s, 5.9 °C in the 1990s, 6.6 °C in the 2000s and 2010s, and 7.0 °C so far in the 2020s.
Read it as a trend, not to the tenth of a degree: the older stations stood between half a kilometre and a kilometre and a half from today's, the instruments changed, and there is a gap from 2006 to 2007.
Why a weather tool
Most of our work is turning data that already exists into something people can act on: combining sources, staying useful when one of them fails, and being honest about what the numbers can and cannot say. A weather station at our doorstep is the smallest real example of that we could think of. We first built it for Fjærkroa, here on Sleneset.
From now on, new tools and notable updates to the existing ones will be announced here in News. The Tools page grows one deliberate cycle at a time.
Oleksandr Kozachuk, Kaizenkodo