Weather data!
“Data is the new oil.” — Clive Humby
I evaluated a few weather data providers [1], and I'm going to get started with Open Weather (OW). I might swap out this for a different data provider at some point later on. So I'll factor this in when building a weather service in code, to not directly couple the data model to OW's API, but I'll get back to that later.
OW provides global weather coverage and offers a free tier. "One Call API"[2] is the only API I could find offered by OW at the free tier that provides hourly forecast data. At some point I might upgrade to a higher tier, which will unlock other APIs, but this API will be good enough for now to get started.
I don't love how you have to call the One Call API with lat/long rather than a place name, because that means I'm going to have to geocode the user's location (Washington, D.C. -> 38.9072, 77.0369), but I can get over that.
The main data points I'm interested in right now include:
- current / hourly / daily:
- temp
- cloud cover %
- windspeed
- humidity
- precipitation
- weather description (partially sunny, rainy, etc)
- sunrise time
- sunset time
- severe weather alerts
These data points will form the foundation that we can build on to create personal temperature profiles™ later on :)
[1] https://medium.com/@Ari_n/8-weather-api-alternatives-now-that-darksky-is-shutting-down-42a5ac395f93
[2] https://openweathermap.org/api/one-call-api
