Many overlook the importance and value of weather data yet, often, it plays a vital role in public safety, risk assessment and even in business operations. Insurance carriers, for example, can properly assess the risks when insuring a property or validating a claim by using historical, current, and predictive weather information. Transportation companies can leverage the same information to schedule routes for vehicles and avoid severe weather.
Weahtherbit can provide your business with accurate weather forecasts and historical weather data via API. It leverages machine learning to correct weather models for biases and inconsistencies. It also uses advanced "nowcasting" techniques to provide a highly accurate Rainfall/Snowfall Nowcast API based on live Doppler radar, satellite, and ground station observations.
What is A Weather API?
A weather API provides historical weather data and forecast data through a programming interface. It is a set of protocols and tools that retrieve weather data from various sources, acting as an intermediary for software applications to access real-time, forecasted, and historical weather information.
Weather APIs pull data from weather data sources like meteorological stations, satellites, and radars. They offer short-term and long-term weather forecasts, including real-time data access to current temperature, humidity, precipitation, and other relevant weather conditions. They are essential tools for international operations as they are invaluable for research, analysis, and planning purposes.
Truth in Nature: Weather APIs and its Benefits
A weather API can retrieve the exact weather conditions at any given time and location directly in the code of applications. For example, you can get accurate temperature forecasts from Weatherbit to control HVAC systems, its cloud cover/solar radiation for solar arrays on buildings, and its air quality forecasts for building air filtration.
Weather APIs are suitable for applications that need large volumes of weather or for users who need to access weather data in an automated way. They streamline the retrieval process by querying only the necessary data and delivering the information in a structured and easily accessible format.
Not all businesses are heavily impacted by rain, temperature, or wind. However, weather APIs can provide other important weather-related information like air quality, which is important to reduce the infection rates of viruses or humidity, which creates conditions for some allergies to manifest, resulting in poor health working conditions. Other areas of application included are agriculture, outdoor activities, energy management, retail, weather APIs can provide other weather-related information like air quality, construction, and infrastructure, etc.
Million-dollar Question: Are All Weather Data Providers The Same?
The question begs to be asked: are all weather data providers the same? No, some fail to predict weather conditions accurately, especially when they only rely on station data. Back in 2018, over 200,000 people in South Uganda and western Kenya were displaced due to the unpredicted rainfall that fell over the drought stricken areas. Reliance on stations was insufficient since there are only less than 500 total reporting stations in central Africa.
Weatherbit, on the other hand, was able to pick up the impending rainfall that resulted in a major flooding event. It is backed by over 120,000 weather stations. Weatherbit updates its data as fast as it is reported, although this can vary by location. Weather data updates occur between 15 to 30 minutes. Radar/satellite updates happen every 10 to 15 minutes.
The historical weather API can retrieve precipitation observations in areas like Africa, Asia, and South America where only a few ground-based observations exist. It can also provide data derived from satellite-based observations and high resolution historical re-analysis products.
Weatherbit's Highlighted Features
Weatherbit emphasizes data and data coverage, unlike other weather API providers. It incorporates over 20 separate datasets from raw station data to model data and then to atmospheric re-analysis products. It sources data from the world's most advanced weather datasets like the NASA satellite data, multi-sensor satellite-based precipitation (NASA IMERG), the ERA5 re-analysis, and more.
Multi-Data Source Approach
The multi-data source approach of Weatherbit allows the weather API to serve the most relevant and local data possible. Powered by machine learning, forecast error is reduced to nearly 50% in select areas. Most weather data providers only serve weather station data, which is inappropriate due to limited station coverage and quality.
Unparalleled Forecast Accuracy
Weatherbit offers unparalleled forecast accuracy by leveraging the power of forecast models and machine learning. The accuracy is tracked by unaffiliated 3rd parties such as Forecast Advisor. The weather API is hosted in multiple data centers, ensuring >99.999% availability. It also offers uptime guarantees ranging from 95% to 99.99% for customers subscribed to the Enterprise plan.
99.99% Uptime
It has a long history of nearly 100% uptime, proven by its status and outage history visible on the status page. Weatherbit provides each person's health status based on the weather API's responses instead of doing a simple ping test.
During regular operations, all data requests are split between all healthy API nodes based on the request latency relative to the user's location. In the event of a complete outage of the Data Center, customer requests are prioritized based on their subscription plan and support level, minimizing downtime and disruption to operations for subscribed to 99.99% uptime agreements.
Scalable
Users can scale their usage of the weather API based on their budget. Weatherbit offers a free subscription, which is inclusive of 7-day/daily forecasts and current weather data. They can upgrade to a paid subscription to access more features, such as hourly/minute forecasts, climate normals, historical data, and APIs for air quality, Ag-weather, energy, and so on.
Gap-Free Historical Weather API
Weatherbit can provide the most accurate collection of gap-free historical weather data on the web since it is based on multiple data sources. Its historical weather API can provide data from 20 years ago and at timesteps as small as 15 minutes. It utilizes advanced methods to fill in and interpolate missing data so it can serve a historical weather dataset with 99.95% data availability for any location and at any time.
Hyperlocal Weather API
The weather API can also provide hyperlocal observed weather data and weather forecasts with spatial resolutions ranging from < 1 KM to 13 KM. It combines the most powerful public models and historical data into one complete global weather dataset.
Weather Forecast API
Weatherbit derives from high-resolution global and regional weather models to provide accurate forecasts for business applications. It uses state-of-the-art machine learning methods to correct model biases. Many weather fields are accessible, like wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, humidity, dew point, and so on. Users can also look up weather data by many methods, including latitude/longitude, city name, weather station ID, airport ICAO code, and postal code for any country.
The Weather Forecast API can serve hourly forecasts out to 120 hours or daily forecasts up to 16 days in the future. It can also provide 60-minute precipitation forecasts backed by weather radar, satellite, and deterministic nowcasting methods, ensuring accurate weather predictions for rain, snow, sleet, or hail.
Conclusion
Accurate weather forecasts are critical so people have the correct information to prepare for any weather condition. Weatherbit provides access to accurate forecasts derived from the world's best high-resolution and regional weather models, backed by machine learning, to reduce forecast error. It offers many APIs, from air quality to historical weather, delivering the data required to assess weather conditions for any location or time.
