ProgrammableWeb recently published an analysis of the top free and paid Weather APIs available in our directory. Please click here to read the full analysis.
Everybody talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it. Except when they're building mashups. Or so it seems, given how often the 5 weather APIs in our directory get used by developers. While perhaps not as sexy as the latest social networking API, here at ProgrammableWeb we have evidence that developers value a good API for weather, having built over 70 weather mashups to date. What are the weather APIs?
Weather Underground API: The latest weather API added to our directory is from the service Weather Underground. This API provides real-time weather data for major cities around the world as well as highly local weather reports. Wikipedia notes that it is the "most of its information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information from that agency is within the public domain by federal law" and that in 2008 it was the #2 Internet weather service. The open API does not require an API key.Track this API
Related: Top 10 Weather APIs
yr.no API: yr.no is "the joint online weather service from the Norwegian Meteorological Institute (met.no) and the Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation (NRK). yr.no offers weather forecasts in English for more than 700,000 places in Norway and 6.3 one million places worldwide." This RESTful API offers a wide range of this data in XML.Track this API
WeatherBug API: WeatherBug is a full source weather provider featuring exclusive data from its own network of over 8,000 weather observation stations in the USA. The API gives you access to live weather conditions, forecasts and severe weather warnings for all US zip codes.Track this API
Weather Channel API: As the folks at the Weather Channel describe, "Since 1982, The Weather Channel has brought timely weather information to the world. Now you can include weather from The Weather Channel in your own application by signing up for access to our XML data feed. We'll enable you to search for a location and to integrate current conditions and the forecast for today and tomorrow in your application for free" .Track this API
NOAA Weather Service API: NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, offers this SOAP-based API. As they note: "The National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a service providing the public, government agencies, and commercial enterprises with data from the National Weather Service’s (NWS) digital forecast database." It's a useful and reliable service, even if the site itself looks like it hasn't been updated in years.Track this API
And what fame and riches await if you're a developer using these sorts of weather web services? Well if you're lucky, you could end-up like David Schorr, creator of classic mashup WeatherBonk, a mashup that was ultimately acquired by the Weather Channel themselves.
Comments(14)
[...] John Musser created an interesting post today on 5 Weather APIs - From WeatherBug to Weather ChannelHere’s a short outlineThis API provides real-time weather data for major cities around the world as well as highly local weather reports. Wikipedia notes that it is the “most of its information comes from the National Weather Service (NWS), as information … [...]
[...] are a handful of official weather APIs. And, as we noted in our weather APIs post in April, there is a lot of developer interest. ProgrammableWeb lists 83 weather mashups, but only [...]
[...] Historical weather data from Weather Underground, providing year-by-year hourly information for most cities in the world. (See also this list of weather APIs.) [...]
I have been developing websites for travel industry and weather has played a great role in form of content. I have tried all the above mentioned weather APIs but I felt they all lacked the simplicity for most of the new developers. I have been using World Weather Online, a new weather service which is slowly getting popular. World Weather Online provide weather by REST method for any postocde, zipcode and Latitude and longitude. They have also recently launched the Location Search API which I think is really handy for city search. If any of you have tried then please do share your thoughts in here.
Website Url: www.worldweatheronline.com
[...] are some online weather APIs 5 Weather APIs – From WeatherBug to Weather Channel (Support Ecomodder.com & get rid of these annoying [...]
For weather.com API I can recommend client library implemented in .NET http://weatherclient.codeplex.com/
[...] festivals happening in the user’s area is a good idea: Weather based promotions By using a weather API, you can actually find out the user’s weather based on their location and change your [...]
I recently develop a weather page with geolocalitation (HTML5), try this api:
http://www.theweathernow.net/api/
it uses the google weather api.
Why has there been no news coverage on any of the television channels addressing the 5.3 Earthquake in Southern Colorado this past Monday night, 22nd of August, 2011?? It was felt in 2 or 3 surrounding states and throughout all of Colorado. Truly amazing, the little or no informaton that was afforded this event.
You can find how to create weather widget using jQuery, YQL and weather.com here http://jobyj.in/api/create-a-weather-widget-using-jquery-yql-and-weather...
A new weather API was just released by HAMweather that is flexible and offers more weather content than most of the other ones out there.
http://www.hamweather.com
WeatherBug requires you to send 10% of any iOS revenue you receive at the end of each month as payment for the service. Coo coo crazy.
I'd like to throw our name in the ring too:
http://www.weather-api.net
thanks
http://openweathermap.org is a web service that provides free weather data and forecast API suitable for any cartographic services including web and smartphones applications. Ideology is inspired by OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia that make information free and available for everybody. OpenWeatherMap wide range of weather data - map with current weather, week forecast, precipitation, wind, clouds, data from weather stations, data from radars. Weather data is recieved from global meterological broadcast services and more than 40 000 weather stations.