Weather API - Provides "About to..." Information? [closed]

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开发者_运维问答

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I'm looking for a weather API which has information on what the weather is "About to do..." (within as short a time as possible).

For instance, I could put in Mountain View, CA and retrieve: "About to starting raining in 10 minutes..."

(So far, I've only found the daily weather condition.)

Is this available anywhere?

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Airports (and other instances) publish weather information regularly as a METAR report (which describes the current weather) and a TAF report (which describes what's coming, with probabilities).

If you were to check the weather for Stockholm (Sweden) you first find an airport there (I choose Arlanda for this example). The ICAO code for Arlanda is ESSA (Europe Sweden Stockholm Arlanda). Luftfartsverket, the Swedish authority for air space control, consolidates all metar published into one page, and taf at another making it easier to get an overview.

This info was current at the writing of this post:

METAR: ESSA 020850Z 28005KT 9999 FEW014 BKN015 M07/M08 Q1006 RWY 19 ICE 
            0-10 PCT 1 MM FC 0.50 RWY 26 ICE 0-10 PCT 1 MM FC 0.47 NOSIG=

TAF: ESSA 020530Z 0206/0306 29007KT 9999 SCT014 BKN035 PROB30
          0206/0306 4000 -SN BKN008=

You need to read the linked Wikipedia articles for information on the parsing. This following is just a part of what they tell you. The metar is taken 08:50 zulu time (gmt+0), about 10 minutes ago, wind speed at 5 knots, good visibility, -7 degrees celsius. The taf is older, (05:30 zulu time) and indicates some snow (-SN).

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I believe the limitation to what you're asking for isn't in lack of programming technology or because there isn't an API, but is in fact because the field of meteorology has not progressed to the point where meteorologists can predict the weather so accurately.

You do have vision! Imagine what we could do if we could in fact predict the weather to the minute!

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TAFs are great if your area is located around an airport that produces a forecast. However this most often is not the case.

Honestly you have three good options.

Model Output Statistics provide a wealth of information based on 3 hour increments. There are tons of MOS stations across CONUS to use.

Local aviations products or LAMP is a similar format and it is hourly.

Lastly there are BUFKIT files. These files can help your forecast the entire atmosphere and not just the surface.

All these products are plain text products that are parsable. There is an API service that serves the products in neat way but it is private as of now ... I believe it will become open source here in the next couple months after it is replaced.

IMO I'd go with the LAMP product ... here a description on the format for parsing.