GWS - About
In recent updates to Pokémon GO, a weather feature was added. The in-game weather changes every hour to "match" the weather in real life at your location based on your phone's GPS. The weather boosts which types of Pokémon may appear, making it easier (or potentially harder) to find a specific Pokémon. While it's easy to know the weather at your current location, what if you want to quickly want to know the weather at some other location you could travel to--physically or magically ;)? That's where the GO! Weather Seacher comes into play!
GWS is a webtool used to lookup the latitude/longitude coordinates of a specific weather condition used within the game (clear, cloudy, windy, rainy, partly cloudy, snowy, foggy). With the click of a single button, you can find the current weather from any of the top 150 cities around the world! Can't find the weather you are after? Check back in an hour because the tool is updated 16 minutes past the hour with the current conditions, 24/7, just like the game.
Normally these lookups are done with a call to an API provided by a weather center (and in fact, that's exactly what this tool does). However, the keys required to make these calls have limitations in the number of requests (unless you're willing to shill out BIG money), only return info for 1 location per request, and can only be used by 1 person. Yikes. GWS takes out all the hassle and serves the information to you, without having to deal with the complications of APIs.
Speaking of limitations, GWS is a one-man operation and based on these API services, which means it's limited to these same restrictions. Because of that, only a small number of cities from around the world can be reported. Which means, at this time, it's currently limited to the 150 cities and only the current conditions; but hey, that's much better than 1, right? Niantic is also rather hush about how the game works in regards to the weather. Technically, Pokémon GO reports the weather for a location determined by level 10 S2 cells. The weather itself is derived from the weather reports provided by AccuWeather, with these conversions specficially (entirely speculation based on community research. Thanks to whoever made that infographic!). What does all that mean? It means that this tool cannot be 100% accurate to the game, so you very well may find that the in-game weather doesn't match the ones reported. Will it be close? Yep. Will it often be right? I certianly hope so! Should you drop everything, buy a ticket, and hop on that plane right now because the tool says it's sunny on the other side of the world? Well...up to you. But if you do, souveniers are always appreciated!
