# Weather data!

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