Timely update of Accuweather UV Index forecast for today

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1

I’m a little confused by how weather is supposed to update.

My objective is to notify the family if today’s UV index high is above a certain level, in order to prompt the kids to wear sunscreen. This needs to happen at the most practical time which is between 7.30 and 8.30am.

However, the sensor.accuweather_XXXXX_uv_index_today updates it seems once a day at random times, which tend not to be useful, e.g. 6pm, 11pm. Today it updated at 10am-ish, but that is still too late for my needs.

I dont understand why daily forecasts are not retrieved e.g. overnight, so that when you wake up you have up to date information?

I’ve set the timezone for my Accuweather and Accuweather API accounts to my location.

I’ve also found the weather update action, which can be successfully called, but doesn’t seem to update the Accuweather integration sensors, so I guess I could run the action, and pull the information I need from the json using my automation at runtime, but this doesn’t seem to be the best way to do things - it kind of makes the sensors provided by the integration redundant as they cannot relied upon to be up to date when viewed.

Is there a better way?

2

Are you sure you’re looking at the correct entity? I’m using Accuweather too and this is what I see for sensor.home_uv_index without having to touch anything

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3

Yep, Im looking at a different sensor to the one you are referring to, yours represents the current UV index at a given time, and my version of that sensor is similar.

However, sorry, I’m afraid I realise now I’ve conifused things as I had renamed my sensor from:

accuweather_home_uv_index_day_0

To:

accuweather_home_uv_index_today

The day_0 sensor represents the maximum expected uv index for the current day (day_1 is for tomorrow etc), so that should enable us to see that at 8am, before the kids leave the house they can apply sunscreen if appropriate (a 8am tje uv ind3x may be 3 but it may be expected to rise to 8 around lunchtime).

Here is today, it correctly shows 6 for today, but not until 11.07am which is too late to be useful. Not only does it update late, but Accuweather provide the expected value for future days, so if nothing else it should be able to provide yesterday’s tomorrow value until today’s today value is known.

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It is also weird that it remains low until that time, and reverts to a low value again later in the day (2 today).

The future day sensors day_1 (tomorrow), day_2 etc operate as expected, here’s today’s value for tomorrow (day_1):

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I’d expect to see a similar graph for day_0, or perhaps one which is refined at some point as a more accurate prediction becomes known.

I guess it is possible Accuweather are providing duff data, but something seems awry either way.