OpenWeather Sponsors World Data League

The World Data League (WDL) represents the gathering together of the world’s leading data scientists to create real-world solutions to socially orientated problems, helping create a positive impact on our society and environment. 

It is a competition comprising 50 teams, spread over 39 countries with 201 participants. The projects that the teams work on are selected from the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, and are made public at the end of the competition, enabling the solutions to be used by anyone for free, no matter their geographical location.

The WDL represents the bringing together of communities, including data scientists, data science companies, and topic entities (organisations working on the social issue topics themselves). 

The project demonstrates versatility of uses around weather data:

“The data from OpenWeather is crucial as all the challenges of the World Data League are connected to 'Data-Driven Communities'. Weather and air quality are two big topics that influence how a city lives and therefore it is crucial for solving the challenges. Currently, they have been used in challenges for predicting the usage of soft-mobility for its optimizations, predicting the level of pollution at street level in Amsterdam, predicting the production of waste in Austin and predicting of people flow to and from the city of Porto. There are more challenges on the way, but those are still a secret.”

This years topics have included:

• Environment - Finding a sustainable balance between our own comfort and its impact on our wider environment. The challenge includes being able to reduce waste production through accurate predictions.

• Public transportation - finding solutions to alleviate the congestion in our crowded cities. Investigating how to create a balance between public transportation and soft mobility (traveling under your own steam, walking, running, cycling, roller-skating etc). This challenge involves improving the air quality of our global cities.

OpenWeather are pleased to announce that we will be working in partnership with WDL to provide open access to a number of our data products for use in the 2022 competition. This builds on our commitment to supporting climate initiatives, education, health and the wider developer community. 

Participants in the WDL were to access our OpenWeather Developer Plan, giving use of a number of our products including our Air Pollution API, weather Dashboard and Historical weather data, as well as our Medium Plan that will give access to our Statistical Weather Data API providing statistical data for the main weather parameters for a chosen date or month of the year, or for the entire year.

OpenWeather Initiatives:

We believe that access to climate data provides an enormous potential to benefit. We provide the same detailed, accurate and varied climate data available to the world-leading data scientists at WDL to the student community, helping them become tomorrow’s pioneers in data science. We encourage students and experts alike to join us in contributing to the ever increasing open source resources inspired by Wikipedia and OpenStreetMap.

We have also supported independent health research groups investigating the challenges that the covid-19 pandemic presented by supplying weather data included in our medium plan. We also support those that make direct contributions through their own local weather stations to our platform with access to our Startup Plan.

For more information on how to gain access to our OpenWeather products, please e-mail us.