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OpenWeatherMap team wishes you a happy New Year! Thank you for being with us this year, we hope to see you in 2018.

As a Christmas gift, we've prepared some special weather widget, that you can embed into your site or blog to watch for the holiday weather in your city area. You can get it at the weather widgets page .

Openweathermap team wishes happy Merry Christmas and a beautiful holiday weather for New Year to all our users and visitors! Thank you for being with us this year!

In the drawing is global coverage obtained between 06.01.2017 and 09.01.2017 using data from the MODIS spectroradiometer aboard KA Terra and Aqua.

The current cloudless coverage of the Earth by medium and low-resolution satellite images are an important element in the regional and global systems that monitor the territorial changes caused by natural and man-made factors. For example, assessing the damage inflicted by forest fires caused by deforestation, volcanic eruptions, flooding,etc. Also, such types of coverage are popular as the base layer for cartographic web services.

The main stages of creating such coverage are: the selection of images, expert as a rule, the masking of clouded areas, tonal adjustment of images taken at different times of the year, and pasting them into single coverage using so-called “cutlines” which enable, to a certain extent, the joins between the pasted images to be hidden. Such operations, as a rule, are carried out in semi-automatic mode and require specialized software and highly qualified experts, which substantially increases both the time taken to create such a product and its cost.

It isn’t possible to affect weather conditions, but what is possible is to predict them.
Services currently available provide not only accurate up-to-date weather reports, and forecasts for different time-periods, but they also provide visual displays of various weather phenomena on weather maps, allowing a quick assessment of the overall picture. For such a weather-dependent industry as sea transportation, receiving timely accurate and visual information is particularly important.

Sea transport is one of the most tried and trusted ways of delivering cargo. Shipping lanes don’t need rebuilding or to be kept in working order. This is precisely why sea freight doesn’t cost as much as other modes of transportation.
Its main disadvantages are the long delivery time and the dependence of the vessel on weather conditions.
The most important meteorological variables which determine sailing conditions for sea vessels are the wind and those things which are dependent upon it: the condition of the water’s surface, precipitation, and temperature.

The effect weather has on fuel consumption of motor vehicles

The question of fuel efficiency often becomes an extremely acute one for drivers, especially in European countries. High prices for gasoline, environmental pollution - these factors necessitate finding ways to tightly control the amount of fuel consumed. This is of particular relevance to companies engaged in large-scale freight transportation where fuel expenses are a significant part of transport costs, and their reduction can improve the company’s market competitiveness.

Fuel expenses depend on several overall factors: the weight of the vehicle, driving habits, road conditions, and the extra energy expended in certain kinds of weather, etc.

Bearing in mind that road conditions are also often determined by different weather events, it becomes clear that, when planning prolonged resource-consuming trips, attention paid to weather forecasts is not time wasted. And for road-haulage companies, having historical meteorological data for the entire transport route can be extremely useful for assessing the appropriateness of the amount of fuel used by the driver.

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 in the URL is required), which can be targeted to the user’s specific location. 

For your information, Openweathermap website has a new section dedicated to users who work within the agricultural sector.  It can be accessed from the API list page, and at any given moment, detailed API documentation is available on accumulated weather data (such as temperature and precipitation).
This API service is included in the Historical subscriptions by default with the appropriate time limits. Please contact us if you would like to use this API separately.
We plan to expand the section and continue work in this direction.   Stay connected.
We are ready to answer your questions and will be glad to hear any proposals you might have.

The weather in Northern Europe is September - October 2017. We hope that November will be more peaceful.

13th of September - Hurricanes Sebastian 
query builder: day:2017-09-13, terra

5th of October - Hurricanes Xavier
query builder: day:2017-10-05, terra

The night from 27th to 28th of October - Hurricanes Herwart
query builder: between(2017-10-27:2017-10-28), aqua

Weather and climate conditions are some of the primary factors influencing the performance of renewable energy power plants, particularly the performance of photocells in solar batteries.

Weather factors.

Obviously, the intensity of solar radiation has the greatest effect. The efficiency of solar panels is reduced if solar radiation intensity is reduced or absent altogether.

Temperature
Solar batteries perform better at lower temperatures than in a hot climate. Electrical output may be more than normally efficient in winter, in temperatures below freezing.

Cloud cover
Solar radiation reaching the earth’s surface decreases as cloud cover increases. Solar batteries receive maximum sunlight on cloudless days with direct rays of the sun. These are the peak hours when they will be producing the most energy. The light received decreases as the cloud cover increases. Solar batteries will produce minimum usable energy on heavily overcast days. The batteries will work at half their efficiency when there is enough light for objects on the ground to cast a shadow.

Climatic conditions and topography.

To a considerable extent, climatic conditions depend on topography.Mountains, seas and oceans, large lakes and their location relative to each other exercise the greatest influence on the formation and behavior of clouds and on the temperature.This results in the amount of solar radiation in adjacent regions with different topographies varying radically. For example, mountains may get less solar radiation than neighboring foothills and plains. The amount of solar radiation in coastal areas may differ from inland figures.

Distribution of precipitation and temperature on the mountainous coast of Canada north of Vancouver 

All these factors need to be taken into consideration in designing plant infrastructure for planning electrical consumption and load.This makes the accuracy, and hence the source, of weather data very important.

Relevance of data is not guaranteed by proximity to a meteorological station in regions with complex topography, such as in mountainous areas or simply areas with sharp changes in elevation.
At present, complex weather calculation models, which it has become possible to generate using modern technologies such as IoT, Cloud Services, and Big Data, are used to obtain accurate weather data.

OpenWeatherMap weather service is based on the VANE Geospatial Data Science platform for collecting, processing, and distributing information about our planet through easy to use tools and APIs.
We are collecting data from weather stations and forecasts of meteorological services and research laboratories, combining long-term and short-term forecasts with real-time data from weather stations, processing them and immediately updating current weather and forecasts in our API. Today we have more than 40,000 weather stations.
Data is stored in the VANE database and processing with our unique algorithms to create interpolated data of current weather conditions anywhere in the world, as well as into a variety of weather maps.