Blog

Let's consider one of the new interesting cases where weather data by OpenWeatherMap is used. 

Usually it's not a quick and easy deal for pilots to find an air corridor with appropriate weather for flying. Sometimes a search for a starting point of a flight and for its destination point takes up to 1-2 hours. ParaglidingStart.info is an application which uses real-time weather data by OpenWeatherMap alongside with information from many other sources. The application shows the current weather for possible starting points of a flight. There also can be found forecasts and other information like the description of the areas or the airspaces. One can implement further features for the pilots in the future.

Pilots are eager to fly, not to spend time looking for airspaces appropriate for flying. And OpenWeatherMap team is happy that our data help them to do so.

From the first glance, ideal temperature is a subjective notion. It's a usual thing when some people open windows widely, while others wrap up themselves in sweaters and drink hot tea at one and the same room.
One badly tolerates heat, another is afraid of cold. When you are in a room, your comfort temperature depends not only on your physical peculiarities as of a human being, but also your comfort temperature is unique for every surroundings you are in.
The quality of isolation, the tasks you do at home, the amount of working equipment - there is a lot of factors which affect our perception of desired temperature. The comfort temperature is a balance between a wish to wrap up yourself in tons of clothes and a rush every 10 min to cold shower.

Intellectual management of buildings simultaneously solves 2 crucial tasks: it lets decrease  electric power cost and reduce CO2 emission and it all together has a positive effect on ecology.  
For the present moment there exist ready solutions which allow reasonable management of all the equipment: lighting, air conditioning, ventilation, heating, cooling, secure systems, etc.
Effective tools of monitoring observe functioning of a building in real-time mode: the tools calculate energy consumption, analyze current technical issues, trace surplus of CO2 and its emission.
The analysis of data received with the monitoring tools also implements management of processes taking place in buildings remotely. For getting actual information, one needs only to launch a browser.     

And here an easy access to a huge storage of data arrays is really necessary: data of different kinds comes constantly and is being processed in real-time mode. 
Our OpenWeatherMap team is happy to know that our development of weather APIs which are used as a part of global solutions in such projects throughout the world contributes to increasing of energy effectiveness and thus helps to improve ecological situation.   

We are glad to introduce a new version of our satellite image processing platform VANE.
So, what’s new:
Now a request with an error or invalid values will return a response with the recommendations on how to fix it. Also the validation of values became stricter.
For example, the “select” parameter takes only a definite amount of bands. Parameters’ specifications themselves have gone through some changes

You can find the detailed description here http://owm.io/vaneLanguage

It’s easier to work with colors now by using default color schemes and palettes. A corresponding default color palette is automatically generated depending on an operation (the “op” parameter) and a current data source (the “from” parameter). And of course you can make your own color scheme.

We are happy to announce that one of our products - API for UV-index has got significant improvement.    
- Now besides current and historical data, you can also get UVI forecasts for periods of 8 days.    
- Syntax has got considerably easier,  it has become clearer and more unified like other APIs version 2.5.  
- There is a new feature to request data on any geographic coordinates without limits on accuracy.
- Accuracy of UVI modeled data has been increased twice (the interpolation grid step decreased from 0.5 to 0.25 degrees).      
- Soon the support of search by city name, city id and zip-code will be available. 

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

Please pay attention that during 2 weeks UV-index data will be in open access.  Further, access to this data will be available only for paid plans starting from Developer. For more information on our plans please visit  http://openweathermap.org/price

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

We are happy to announce today that Openweathermap has partnered with Planet to provide access to current and archived Rapideye and PlanetScope satellite imagery in the VANE geospatial platform. Planet operates the world’s largest earth observation constellation of satellites and has the capacity to image the world’s landmass on a daily basis.

With this partnership, the VANE platform enables online processing and access to global high resolution imagery from Planet, further diversifying our Global Base Map product that currently offers publically available Sentinel and Landsat data.

>>> Read more

Do you want to receive weather data in your language? We extended the list of supported languages for weather conditions.
Now in our API the following languages are available:

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 all 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 in English is available here: http://openweathermap.org/weather-conditions

We added new version of rendering styles for Weathermap API.

To get weather map layers in new predefined styles you need to add _new to the appropriate layer name like the following:

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 History Bulk section at OpenWeatherMap.com. There you can find a manual on data extraction for different time periods and cities, also there are examples of data extraction in JSON and CSV file formats and description of weather parameters.

Example of weather map layer  - layer's name: temperature, area: worldwide

OpenWeatherMap VANE platform provides many kinds of weather layers including Precipitation, Clouds, Pressure, Temperature, Wind, Snow and Rain.
See the full list of available layers at http://openweathermap.org/api/weathermaps#examples
You can connect them to mobile and web apps as ZXY-tile layers. It is also possible to combine several base maps and overlays in one map like in the following Weathermap example.
The documentation for Weather Maps has been updated. And there is an important change - please pay your attention, that starting from the next week, API key to access tiles will be obligatory.
Note, that Weather Maps are available for Free keys as well as for all paid ones.