First of all, I’m an enthusiast new user of the tempest system. I made a local skill for my Alexa smart speakers. When you ask Alexa to open “Tempest” the skill requests actual api’s datas of my own system and then read for you the actual weather situation. Very simple but efficient.
My question is: using brightness, solar radiation and UV parameters there could be a way to let the system know if it is cloudy, or sunny? using the same datas plus the humidity there could be a way to let the system know that is probably foggy?
I once suggested to find a way that would report the “hours of sunshine”… hours that the sun is clearly visible (not covered by clouds). I guess it can be done, but it didn’t happen yet. I don’t know if it ever is going to happen.
What you could try is to look for strong deviations between the expected sunny brightness values based on your location, date and time of day, and compare that with the measured value, if that almost matches, you could perhaps conclude that it is sunny.
Already got a nearly accurate formula for using the observed UV and a theoretical max UV for a specific time (month/day/hour/minute) at a specific location (lat/lon)…
The Max is based on observed 2010 Monthy Max UV values worldwide, psuedo-corrected for today… and augmented by user-submitted corrections (like when the Max is showing less than observed).
Incorporating it into btstWx (and the new WeatherBox).