Yr.no – The World’s Largest Free Weather Service

By ThorNews on August 2, 2012 • ( 0 )

yr.no is a Norwegian weather site provided by Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK) and the Norwegian Meteorological Institute. The service is funded by the Norwegian tax payers and currently has around 4.6 million unique users every week. 44 percent of the users come from Norway, 28 percent from Sweden and 28 percent from the rest of the world. The service is available in English.

yr.no’s main task is to safeguard the lives and values in Norway by giving Norwegian citizens good weather forecasts and warnings of hazardous weather. In addition yr.no provides accurate weather forecasts for 8 million locations worldwide.

The Norwegian and Scandinavian forecasts are quality controlled by Norwegian meteorologists, forecasts for the rest of the world is made by computers based on meteorological data models.

See also: Vilhelm Bjerknes – The Father of the Modern Weather Forecasts

The reason that yr.no has become so popular outside of Norway is that yr.no was among the first weather sites that published forecasts for the whole world. You can find forecasts for all countries, all cities, islands, lighthouses, hotels, beaches, etc.The weather service also offers free weather data in XML format for about 7 million places.