Add explanations to variables in documentation

[kajetanschuler]

Hey,

I really love your work and it is really handy in my private tracking project. My only problem is, that I can't seem to find the exact meanings of some variables. I studied the docs but couldn't find anything. Is there a list or something which describes the variables?

Thank you very much!

[jdemaeyer]

Hi @kajetanschuler, thanks for reaching out and for the kind words :)

You are unfortunately not the first to ask this question. The list you're looking for exists but it is quite hidden in the auto-generated docs that Bright Sky uses. I'll improve them this summer with #145! You can find it by clicking the SCHEMA tab in the "Response" section for each endpoint:

The units used for each field are listed under the units parameter description in the "Request" section. (Plus there are currently three more fields in an experimental / undocumented state, see #95 and #141.)

Hope this helped, otherwise just let me know!

[kajetanschuler]

Hi @jdemaeyer thank you very much. Exactly what I was looking for. Sorry, that I didn't find it! Thank you also for implementing the solar feature. Does global in this case mean worldwide?

[jdemaeyer]

Glad it helped! There's no need to apologize, situations like this are very much a fault in the docs' design and not a user fault.

In case of the solar parameter, global does no refer to "worldwide" but refers to the global horizontal irradiation, i.e. the total incoming energy that hit a 1 m² area at the location of the weather station (in the past hour). It's called "global" because it refers to the whole sky, counting both light coming straight from the sun (beam irradiation) and light scattered by the atmosphere (diffuse irradiation). This wiki article has some more info if you feel like going down a rabbit hole ;)

[jdemaeyer]

Closing in favor of #145