The OpenWeather team announces Weather Maps 2.0, where you can now work not only with current weather layers but also with historical and forecast maps!

Objectives

As farms mainly consist of crop fields, which can be hundreds of acres in size, much time and a great deal of resources are demanded of farmers in obtaining an accurate picture of the overall condition of these farms.

Drying out of plants or, conversely, an excess of moisture and a rise in the number of pests: these can all take their toll on the size and quality of the harvest and demand a rapid response. There are also such problems as the danger of overusing fertilisers, which poses a threat not only in terms of extra costs but also in that it is harmful to the environment and primarily to the health of farmers themselves.

To maximise harvests, constant monitoring is required throughout the season; and it is not easy finding the time to keep up with changes for each crop, not to mention monitoring the condition of every single acre. When deciding on long-term plans, a comparative analysis has to be carried out for both the usual course of the seasonal cycle and, in particular, any crises that have arisen.

To assess the current situation and to keep track of changes compared with preceding seasons and with the condition of neighbouring fields, accurate information on both the past and the present is needed as well as future forecasts that are as precise as possible.

Solutions

There are currently numerous services that help with managing farms for any acreage: checking boundaries and nutrient and moisture intake, monitoring the negative effects of weather conditions and diseases, and controlling pest numbers. And this can all be done without having to visit the fields, just by using a phone or tablet screen or a PC.

It is exactly to provide these services that OpenWeather offers a wide range of APIs for different weather and satellite data combined in the one product, the Agro API, with universal and simple syntax.

We invite anyone wishing to do so to try out our weather widget’s new geolocation and weather map functionality – https://openweathermap.org (please note that ‘https://’ is required in the URL), which can be targeted to your specific location.

We are happy to announce that one of our products – API for UV-index – has been significantly improved.

• Now, as well as current and historical data, you can also get UVI forecasts for periods of 8 days.
  
• The syntax has been made considerably easier: it has become clearer and more unified, like other API versions.
  
• There is a new feature to request data for any geographic coordinates without limits on accuracy.
  
• The accuracy level of the UVI modelled data has been doubled (the interpolation grid step has been reduced from 0.5 to 0.25 degrees).  
  
• Soon, searching by city/town name, city/town ID and postal/ZIP code will be available.

You can find the instructions for the updated version at http://openweathermap.org/api/uvi.

Access to the UV-index data will be available for all our plans. For more information on our plans, please visit http://openweathermap.org/price.

The previous version of the API (http://openweathermap.org/api/old-uvi) will soon be announced as deprecated, and no further support will then be provided for this version.

Do you want to receive weather data in your language? We have extended the list of supported languages for weather conditions.

Now the following languages are available in our API:

Arabic (ar); Czech (cz); Greek (el); Persian (Farsi) (fa); Galician (gl); Hungarian (hu); Japanese (ja); Korean (kr); Latvian (la); Lithuanian (lt); Macedonian (mk); Slovak (sk); Slovenian (sl); Vietnamese (vi).

We invite our users to test translations for weather conditions in different languages. We will be happy to extend our language support according to your wishes. If you have any questions or suggestions, please send them to https://openweathermap.desk.com/. The specification for all weather conditions is available here: http://openweathermap.org/weather-conditions.

We have added new versions of the rendering styles for the Weather Maps API.

To get the weather map layers in the new predefined styles, you need to add _new to the appropriate layer name, as follows:

http://tile.openweathermap.org/map/{layer}_new/{z}/{x}/{y}.png?appid={api_key}

For your convenience while working with our historical data, we have created the History Bulk section at OpenWeatherMap.com. There you can find a manual on extracting data for different time periods and cities/towns; there are also examples of data extraction in JSON and CSV file formats, and descriptions of weather parameters.

We are happy to introduce to you our new service that provides historical weather data for more than 30,000 cities/towns for the last 5 years.

Now you can simply choose a city/town (or several cities/towns) and download an archive, which contains a bulk file with the weather history for up to 5 years – any day or week, or even several years. Pricing is simple and easy – just $10 for one city/town, no matter how much data you receive – see http://openweathermap.org/price.

Just sign in and place an order on your personal page at https://home.openweathermap.org/history_bulks/new. Please note that our traditional History API stays the same.

We invite you to try our new product, Weather Alerts – it provides weather alerts based on our meteorological data.

Now you can use simple syntax to create triggers, which will work upon the occurrence of specified weather conditions (temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.) in a certain period of time. For example, if you are interested in forecasts of the approach of frosts or the probability of strengthening of wind in a certain place, you can get this information by using our new tool.

The alerts will be generated in our service when the conditions for the trigger are satisfied. You will need to poll the service within a certain time interval in order to receive them. For the future, we are planning to improve and develop this service, with the addition of push notifications and new data sources.

You can find out more at http://openweathermap.org/triggers.

Weather Alerts structure: http://openweathermap.org/triggers-struct.

OpenWeatherMap is happy to announce good news for owners of private weather stations! We are launching a new version of Weather Stations API 3.0. Now there are more easy ways to manage your stations and transmit their data.