Openweathermap

OpenWeatherMap
Founded 2012
Owner Extreme Electronics LTD.
Website openweathermap.org

OpenWeatherMap is an online service that provides a free API for weather data, including current weather data, forecasts, and historical data to the developers of web services and mobile applications. For data sources, it utilizes meteorological broadcast services, raw data from airport weather stations, raw data from radar stations, and raw data from other official weather stations. All data are processed by OpenWeatherMap such that it attempts to provide accurate online weather forecast data and weather maps, such as those for clouds or precipitation. Beyond that, the service is focused on social aspect by involving owners of weather stations to connect them to the service to increase accuracy of weather data. The ideology is inspired by OpenStreetMap and Wikipedia that make information free and available for everybody. It uses OpenStreetMap for display of weather maps.

API

OpenWeatherMap provides free API[1] to open data of current weather, forecast and maps with weather phenomena like clouds, wind, pressure and precipitation. All weather data can be obtained in JSON, XML or HTML format.

Current weather data

Current weather data can be searched by city (200,000+ available cities) or by geographic coordinates on Earth. Data is refreshed every 10 minutes.

Forecasts

Weather forecasts can be searched by city (200,000+ available cities) or by geographic coordinates on Earth. 3-hourly forecasts are available for up to 5 days. Daily forecasts are available for up to 16 days.

Searching

OpenWeatherMap geocoding system lets find cities by name, country, zip-code or geographic coordinates. It is possible to search by part of city name. To make searching result more accurate city name and country should be divided by comma.

Maps

OpenWeatherMap service provides lots of weather maps including Precipitations, Clouds, Pressure, Temperature, Wind and many others. Maps can be connected to mobile applications and web sites. Weather maps can be connected as layers to the wide range of maps including Direct tiles, WMS, OpenLayers, Leaflet, Google maps, and Yandex maps.

Weather station connection

Weather station can be connected to OpenWeatherMap service in three steps:

  1. Station should be registered in registration form
  2. API should be connected[1]
  3. Data should be checked on personal page OpenWeatherMap.org/my

Licensing

All data that OpenWeatherMap provides is used under the terms of the OpenStreetMap Creative Common license CC-BY-SA 2.0.

Competitors

"Open"

Despite its "open" name and claiming to be inspired from OpenStreetMap, there is no evidence OpenWeatherMap is an open project. No source code or database dump have been published so far, and it is not possible to contribute.

It looks more like OpenWeatherMap is a free commercial API providing ready-to-use access to open-data from NOAA. The 40 000 stations claimed are mostly stations made available by the WMO.

References

  1. ↑ 1.0 1.1 OpenWeatherMap, API

Further reading

External links