Open Weather Forecast API

3 min readMay 2, 2020

Weather Forecast API

Access current weather data for any location on Earth including over 200,000 cities! Current weather is frequently updated based on global models and data from more than 40,000 weather stations. Data is available in JSON, XML, or HTML format.

Additionally, the OpenWeatherMap service allows any users to get basic weather data on the company’s website[4].

We are glad to announce our new API version for managing your personal weather stations — Weather Stations API 3.0 (beta). It went through some essential changes in comparison with the previous version.

http://www.softwareschule.ch/examples/weatherapp47.txt

The main improvement is that users now have more flexible control of their stations and allowed to share and transfer data related to them. New API in RESTful style makes this process easy and convenient. In the previous version user’s account was limited to single station, but with our new version users are allowed to add as many stations as they need.

API call:

api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q={city name}

api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q={city name},{country code}

Parameters:

q city name and country code divided by comma, use ISO 3166 country codes

Examples of API calls:

api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London

api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?q=London,uk

http://api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/forecast?q=bern&units=metric&APPID=key

{"cod":"200","message":0,"cnt":40,"list":[{"dt":1572814800,"main":{"temp":7.9
4,"temp_min":6.7,"temp_max":7.94,"pressure":996,"sea_level":996,"grnd_level":926,
"humidity":91,"temp_kf":1.24},"weather":[{"id":500,"main":
"Rain","description":"light rain","icon":"10n"}],"clouds":{"all":93},
"wind":{"speed":5.25,"deg":228},"rain":{"3h":1},"sys":{"pod":"n"},
"dt_txt":"2019-11-03 21:00:00"},{"dt":1572825600,"main":{"temp":7.68,
"temp_min":6.75,"temp_max":7.68,"pressure":997,"sea_level":997,"grnd_level":927,
"humidity":93,"temp_kf":0.93},"weather":[{"id":500,"main":"Rain","description":
"light rain","icon":"10n"}],"clouds":{"all":96},"wind":{"speed":3.01,"deg":200},
"rain":{"3h":2.38},"sys":{"pod":"n"},"dt_txt":"2019-11-04 00:00:00"},{"dt":1572836400,"main":

By city ID

Description:

You can call by city ID. API responds with exact result.

List of city ID city.list.json.gz can be downloaded here http://bulk.openweathermap.org/sample/

We recommend to call API by city ID to get unambiguous result for your city.

Parameters:

id City ID

Examples of API calls:

api.openweathermap.org/data/2.5/weather?id=2172797

{"speed":1.02,"deg":134},"sys":{"pod":"n"},"dt_txt":"2019-11-08 18:00:00"}],"city":{"id":2661552,
"name":"Bern","coord":{"lat":46.9483,"lon":7.4515},"country":"CH",
"population":121631,"timezone":3600,"sunrise":1572761698,"sunset":1572797547}}

At the moment the aggregation uses the fixed list of parameters from the collection of measurements — temperature, humidity, pressure, speed and wind direction, precipitation. In the future this list will extend.

What about a weather station that writes weather instead of read and measures. Writing weather means manipulating or modification of the weather state. Such a writing weather station (WWS) could look like a synthesizer:

In addition to such a science fiction core weather actor — sensor suite, WWS provides real-time rain intensity, event duration and accumulated rainfall measurement with no moving parts. Like a synthesizer we have the VCO (voltage controlled oscillator). These modules produce waves that range from simple to complex, depending on the weather model we wish to generate or to amplify with the VCA .

[gallery ids=”747,748" type=”rectangular”]

Weather modification is the act of intentionally manipulating or altering the weather. The most common form of weather modification is cloud seeding, which increases rain or snow, usually for the purpose of increasing the local water supply. Wikipedia

The OpenWeatherMap service provides a Current Weather API, along with several types of forecasts with different depths and measurement steps:

Hourly Forecast — for 4 days
3-hour Step Forecast — for 5 days
Daily Forecast — for 16 days
Climate Forecast — for 30 days

Current weather data are participating in a Mozilla project The WebThings Gateway for home automation: Monitor and control all your smart home devices via a unified web interface.[5]