Access to historical weather for specific moment in time. Introducing History API by Timestamp

Mark Twain’s words “History doesn’t repeat itself, but it does rhyme” are even more relevant in today’s data-driven and intelligent world. Accurate, specific, and instant information about our environment are critical ingredients in the decision-making process, by both humans and machines.

Weather, in both its mundane and extreme forms impact countless aspects of our lives and businesses, and access to targeted information about its history can be crucial to both forecasting the future and understanding the past.

OpenWeather has released an API that gives weather information for any specific time within the last 40 years, for any location in the world. It can be integrated into internal systems to provide the specific weather conditions for historic events with remarkable accuracy, virtually instantly. It gives both a general overview of the prevailing weather conditions, along with full and specific details about temperature, pressure, wind speed and direction, rain and snow volumes etc.

In 2016 alone, windstorms cost the UK insurance industry approximately £1bn, mainly through large numbers of small insurance claims, with the average cost of around £700 per claim.

Where exactly does the Timestamp API can be particularly useful? There are quite a few industries that can benefit. First of all, OpenWeather “History API 40 years by timestamp” provides a cost-effective way for the insurance industry to gain instant access to accurate weather information. This information can be used to streamline the claims procedure giving increased customer satisfaction, reducing research costs and fraud, and eliminating potential mistakes.

Machine Learning is being adopted by a wide range of industries, especially those that need to predict the vagaries of customer behaviour. For the logistics industry, being able to instantly feed the prevailing weather conditions for specific historical events into their ML engines can gain a crucial insight into the effects of weather. This, coupled with the OpenWeather predictive weather models, gives a rounded solution for accurately understanding the effect of weather on a variety of events and activities.

Getting up and running with the OpenWeather API cannot be easier – Our sales team can explain how you can gain access for your API key. If you do not have a key already, please just sign up here. You can also start studying our detailed technical documentation.

After gaining access, you can start retrieving data by simply calling the API.

There are 3 things that need to be specified in the API call:

• location’s geographical coordinates (latitude and longitude), 

• timestamp (in Unix format),

• your API key. 

Below is an example of an API request:

https://history.openweathermap.org/data/3.0/history/timemachine?lat=35.6&lon=17.1&
dt=1623561060&appid=API key

More information about this can be found in the dedicated section of the documentation.

Once you make the API request, you will receive an API response with essential weather parameters, such as air temperature, precipitation (rain/snow volume), feels like, wind speed and direction, pressure, humidity, cloudiness, and others. See find the full example of API response here.

Today, the OpenWeather historical API set brings a convenient, accurate and efficient way to help unravel the seemingly endless rhymes of our daily weather. Bring instant historical weather information to your application by simply contacting our team at info@openweathermap.org.