Wipr | Devpost

Inspiration

One time I got stuck in a blizzard driving from New York to Boston. I checked the weather reports for both cities before leaving, and both of them showed a small chance of rain, but didn't mention snow. Both weather reports turned out to be correct--there was no snow in New York when I left and by the time I got to Boston the blizzard had ended. In Connecticut though, it was a near white-out. The drive ended up taking 7 hours as we crawled up I-95.

What it does

Wipr allows you to input a point of departure and a destination. Using the fastest driving route between the two points, it then estimates where you'll be along the route over time and gives you a summary of how the weather will change during the course of your drive. Wipr can give weather reports for routes of any length, but it is more useful to rely on it for longer routes because these are the cases in which the weather can change dramatically.

How we built it

Wipr uses the Google Maps API to plot routes along roadways. After finding the best route, Wipr identifies a series of points along that route and estimates the times at which the driver will reach them. Forecastio then retrieves the weather forecast at each of those points for the time the user will be reaching them.

Challenges we ran into

There are multiple methods for calculating the distance between two lat/lng points on earth. We decided to use the haversine function which gives an accurate great-circle distance between two points.