Posted on April 30th, 2020
Weather data has been available on the Internet for a long time, and there are certainly many options for obtaining it for personal or business reasons. However, customizing the use of live weather readings can result in some interesting innovation. Weather data can add local weather-based customization and personalization to a broad class of consumer applications, business applications, mobile applications, e-commerce, Web sites, marketing campaigns, or even various workflow applications where weather can be a workflow variable.
Using real-time weather data, one can market products and services relevant to a site visitor's current temperature, as weather conditions can vary greatly from one site visitor's location to the next. Customers, prospects, and site visitors can also be alerted to potential adverse weather conditions. There is no doubt a wide canvas of creative applications can be built that leverage real-time weather.
The best way to incorporate live weather data is via an API. With most weather APIs, providing a city and state, zip code, or some other regional identifier as an input parameter will return a JSON data structure with various weather attributes attached.
As an example, here is sample input and output from the Interzoid Zip Code-based Weather API that collects real-time weather readings from thousands of weather stations around the United States:
Input (you can also put the API license key in the authorization header if preferred):
https://api.interzoid.com/getweatherzipcode?license=f8smc6s****&zip=28801
Output:
{"City":"Asheville","State":"NC","TempF":"50.0","TempC":"10.0","Weather":"Rain
Fog/Mist","WindMPH":"0.0","WindDir":"North","RelativeHumidity":"93","VisibilityMiles":"5.00","Code":"Success","Credits":9193}
Here are some more examples of weather data that can be obtained via the API:
To explore further, here are some links:
Interzoid's Weather by Zip Code documentation
Interzoid's Weather by Zip Code OpenAPI 3.0 spec