The weather a balloon measured near you, in Firefox

What it does

• Shows the latest ground-level reading from the weather balloon station nearest to you, with its distance and age.
• Only readings from the last 19 hours count, the same rule as the Groundcheck website. If no balloon has reported lately, it says so and does not guess.
• Searches the web with Flowsearch, a search engine with its own crawler and index.

Your location stays in your browser

The add-on asks Firefox for your location, downloads the recent balloon readings, and works out the nearest one inside your browser. Your position is not sent to Groundcheck. The add-on stores a few settings in your browser and runs a small timer to keep the data fresh.

Permissions, and why

Location

To find the balloon station nearest to you. It is used on your device only.

Storage

To remember its settings and the last readings.

Alarms

A timer that refreshes the readings now and then.

luishae07.github.io, raw.githubusercontent.com and trycloudflare.com

The places it downloads from: the Groundcheck site, the file that holds the current server address, and the server that sends the readings.

Questions

Is it free?

Yes. There are no ads and no accounts.

Where does the weather come from?

From weather balloons (radiosondes): the live feed of sonde.mine.nu, the open SondeHub database, and the NOAA IGRA archive. Groundcheck shows what they measured and does not use a weather model.

Why does it say there is no reading?

There may be no balloon station near you, or none has reported in the last 19 hours. Many places, such as parts of Africa and the tropics, have no station within hundreds of kilometres.

Does it work in other browsers?

It is made for Firefox. Groundcheck itself works in any browser at luishae07.github.io.

Is the code open?

Groundcheck is free software under the AGPL-3.0 licence: github.com/Luishae07/groundcheck.