What's the weather integration with the highest weather model resolution?

Third party integrations HADashboard
1

Hi everyone,
It’s my first post here. So hopefully its in the correct thread.

The last few days I’ve looked at a lot of different weather integrations. But I cannot figure which weather models they are using. There are a lot of lists with different integrations but without any details about the underlying weather forecasting models. Local or regional weather models have a higher resolution in their forecasting.
I am searching for a regional/ high resolution (<10km) weather model with data about the amount and probability of rain.

Any idea which integrations use which models? Any hints are highly appreciated!

Regards
Jonas

2

It would help if we know where you are located since some of the Weather integrations are specific to areas (ie. the UK Met Office).

You will also find that amount of rainfall is not something most Weather integrations have since Forecast data doesn’t really include that. There may be other services you could use to get rainfall data (ie. Defra UK).

You could also use templates to build a combined Weather entity which takes values from various sources.

1 Like
3

I have found that the default weather integration in HomeAssistant that uses the Norwegian weather bureau to be fairly accurate, collating data from affiliated bureaus across the world for many countries.

Try it before trying to re-invent the wheel.

My local country weather bureau has their own HomeAssistant add-on available as a third party HACS add-on. Check there also.

If you want to know the behind-the-scenes data sources and processing, contact them directly. Most welcome the interest.

1 Like
4

I’ve been using OpenWeatherMap for the past couple of months and it’s been quite accurate as far as I can tell. Both precipitation & precipitation_probability are returned in the forecast data. Those were actually the main properties I was interested in, too.

There are a couple of things you need to be aware of though:

  • Their API requires you to give credit card details since you will be charged if you exceed 1000 calls/day. You can set the API to never exceed that limit, but I realise most wouldn’t be comfortable with providing sensitive details just to get a weather report.
  • There is no official regional resolution that I can see, either in the integration docs or on their site. Closest thing I can find is a list of national weather alert sources here.

Alternatively, have a look at the Open Meteo integration, since this doesn’t require CC details. Docs page state that resolution is up to 11km, which is pretty much what you wanted.
Not sure if precipitation & precipitation_probability are actually returned in HA’s forecast response, but their API page lists them (and rain) as hourly variables.

1 Like
5

Please DON’T tell us your region :rofl:

6

All weather services get data points from other weather services, but usually the data points density for areas are lower in the data sets provided publicly, so the resolution is lower.

However the data sets are just somewhat real time data and not forecasts.
To make forecasts they need to run a lot of models on a supercomputer and this is expensive, so typically only the regional area and a bit of the border areas are calculated.
This also goes for met.no, which is good for Norway and Denmark, Sweden and Finland, but Germany, Poland, and somewhat, also UK is less precise.

1 Like
7

Yes, your $5 Raspberry Pi and $5 ESP32 are going to blow their advanced quantum supercomputers right out of the water!!!
If you want expert accurate forecasts, go ask the experts.
Your ancient farmer, looking to the morning and evening sky can often be far more accurate than any data shuffler.
Look out the window and smell the roses…

9

Thanks for your answers already. Maybe my region would be of interest: Germany (didn’t think of that oops :smiley:)

I am not a coding expert… so templating sth. that complex seems out of my league. I was hoping for sth. to be implemented quite easily.

Thanks! I will try that integration.
The Home Assistant Default and the German Weather Bureau (DWD) do not include precipitation_probability.

I’ve integrated OpenWeatherMap and PirateWeather which have the details of interest but at least today both forecasts have been waaaay off the actual weather.

I’ve also tried Open Meteo… does not include precipitation_probability.

I totally get that and there are several free to access weather forecast (webpages and apps) with different weather models in general. That’s why I was wondering whether couldn’t find any integration with different models. But no one is talking about it - neither in the integration documentation or in any forums.

I am currently playing with embeded iframes using the webpage card and the embed-url from Windfinder or Windy. But it doesn’t blend into the whole dashboard - it’s just sth. copied in.

10

Wait - a bit off topic here, but how / where do you get the precipitation & precipitation_probability…? Could you elaborate a bit on how you get the forecast data and how you use those?

11

Every weather service in HA which has been updated in the last few years, should provide the get_forecast action I guess.

It’s the current default way to retrieve the weather data from an weather entity.

So you can go to developers tools → actions and run that manually to see the returned data.

@WagnerJonas as you’re in Germany, you might want to take a look at the DWD custom integration.

I think there is even more than one of them, Inise this one:

It provides both, amount and probability of rain.
And it’s one of the weather models working better for my location.

But keep in mind, that normal weather forecast is always based on the large weather models. They are better in telling you if and how much it will rain in the next 1-2 days, than whether it will rain in the next hour.

This rain warner services apps most of the time use a different approach, watching the satellite images for the movement of rain / clouds and trying to interpolate this into the close future.

I think there are also some threads about that here in the forums, about reading out rain area pixels from public available (often also through this weather services like DWD) weather satellite images and warn about rain.
But sure, this isn’t about long term forecast, so for the best bigger picture you have to bring all this data together.

And in the end, a good rain sensor (and rain amount if you really need that info reliable) will finish a good weather collection from future to close future to reality (now).

1 Like
12

Developer Tools > Actions > enter weather.get_forecasts, select your weather entity & forecast type > click Perform Action. You’ll get the precipitation properties in the response if your weather provider supports it:

image
image748×667 44.1 KB

Plenty of threads in these forums explaining how to do that. Here’s the first 3 I found:

Watch out for older threads - the action was previously called get_forecast but now it’s been renamed to get_forecastS. Make sure you use the latter since the old one will no longer work.

1 Like
13

If you’re looking at the attributes of the weather entity, you will only find precipitation_unit. Why someone decided this was more important than the amount of precipitation for the day is beyond me.

You have to call the get_forecasts action like I explained in my post above to see the properties you need. OpenMeteo API definitely supports it - if it’s not being returned in the forecast response, you might wanna raise a FR under the integration in Github.

1 Like
14

Thanks for all the details! This is actually quite interesting, because the DWD-integration actually returns the probabiliy value. But it’s set to “null” all the time (and we have some rain currently)

weather.dwd_weather_mannheim:
  forecast:
    - datetime: "2025-10-27T16:00:00Z"
      cloud_coverage: 84
      condition: rainy
      precipitation_probability: null
      pressure: 1004.9
      uv_index: 2
      wind_gust_speed: 37
      wind_bearing: W
      temperature: 10.8
      dew_point: 6
      wind_speed: 16.7
      precipitation: 0.7

I am cycling a lot - that’s why a quite accurate rain-forecast for the next 12h is quite important for me. Either for commuting or for longer rides :smiley: