Best Free Alternatives to the Wunderground Weather API
Ever since Weather Underground (WU) announced its acquisition by The Weather Company, a subsidiary company of IBM, there have been plenty of changes around its transition. One of the most notable being the cessation of its popular API service in December 2018, which meant a significant reduction in Wunderground’s breadth of services.
Although the company still offers data packages on current weather data and forecasts, it no longer provides keys to the weather API. This is a huge blow to thousands of users and organizations who have relied on the Wunderground weather API for years.
Despite this turn of events, Wunderground weather API users can still obtain accurate weather-related information from alternative sources. This post puts together the best Weather APIs you can integrate on your website or mobile app.
ClimaCell
ClimaCell is one of the best hyper-local weather providers you’ll come across. Its Micro Weather API provides access to a wide selection of micro-weather data for different locations around the world.
The ClimaCell Micro Weather API feeds its proprietary data models with information from millions of data points sourced from drones, IoT devices, cameras, and cellular signals. With its AI-driven technology, ClimaCell also provides additional functionality like alerts, air quality, fire index, lightning maps, and road risk maps.
Highlights
- It offers a complete suite of current weather data and forecasts for multiple parameters
- It provides use case specific data models
- It provides impressive data layer visualizations
- It returns JSON encoded responses
- It has super-fast refresh times
- It has a free version API with multiple endpoints
AerisWeather
The AerisWeather API is another great weather API and mapping platform that provides access to current weather conditions and forecast data. It also provides APIs for lightning, wildfires, and advanced weather maps with unique customization options.
Highlights
- It uses JSON as the default output format.
- It updates forecast data on our hourly basis in the US and every six hours for locations outside the US.
- Its mapping platform provides advanced layers for a wide range of weather conditions.
- It enables the quick generation of location imagery.
- It offers a free 30-day trial period to get you started with the weather and mapping API.
OpenWeatherMap
The OpenWeatherMap API provides weather data for over 200,000 cities around the world. It allows access to historical weather information, current weather data, and daily forecasts for up to 16 days.
Openweather’s suite of products also includes helpful statistics, graphics, history charts, and interactive maps showing different weather conditions for your location.
Highlights
- It provides access to advanced weather maps with current, historical, and forecast layers
- It supports JSON and XML data formats
- It provides different alerts.
- Its forecast reports include 4 days/hourly, five days/3 hours, and 16 days/daily
- Its free weather API allows a relatively high volume of calls (up to 60 calls per minute). However, this does not include access to historical weather data.
Meteomatics
Meteomatics is a specialist weather data provider based in Switzerland. They provide high-quality weather and environmental data in a simple, easy-to-use API.
In addition to weather information, Meteomatics also offers real-time data as well as forecasts on oceanic tides, atmospheric pollution, space weather, lightning, and more.
Highlights
- It covers basic weather parameters including temperature, wind, precipitation, and solar radiation.
- It provides response data in JSON, CSV, XML, HTML, and PNG formats.
- It pulls updated historical weather information since 1979 from over 10'000 stations across the globe.
- It offers global coverage for up to 15 days advance.
- It offers seasonal forecasts for up to 7 months.
- It provides interactive data visualizations.
- It provides forecasts with over 280 updates daily.
- Its free version allows 500 daily queries, 50 queries per minute, and 10 locations per query.
Storm Glass API
Storm Glass API is a professional weather API that provides forecasts from reputable meteorological institutions. It is dedicated to marine data for seas and oceans around the world, which includes tides, waves, swells, wind, water temperature, visibility, and ice coverage.
The API completes its suite of products with global weather and astronomy APIs, making it one of the most comprehensive, all-round weather providers.
Highlights
- It covers multiple weather parameters such as air temperature, precipitation, cloud coverage, humidity, wind, sunrise/sunset, moon phase, and more.
- The free version gives access to all weather parameters, up to 50 requests per day.
- It sends responses in the form of JSON objects.
- It provides data for any coordinate around the world.
- Its historical data is limited to 2017–01–01. You will need to contact support for data older than this date.
National Weather Service API
The National Weather Service (NWS) API offers public access to a wide array of data, including critical forecasts, past weather, observations, alerts, and other weather data.
Highlights
- Best public-facing and government-backed weather API
- It provides different weather conditions, including temperature, humidity, dewpoint, wind speed, wind direction, precipitation, and more.
- NWS API endpoints offer JSON format by default, but also support XML.
- It provides comprehensive documentation on its GitHub page.
- Its alert web service uses CAP for data and information sharing across local, state, and non-governmental organizations.
- It offers comprehensive updates on weather hazards.
Weather API
The Weather API is a powerful and geolocation API designed for developers. It allows users to access accurate weather data for any geo point across the globe.
With this API, you can access a wide range of current weather data or forecasts using city name, latitude, and longitude, airport code, zip code, IP address, or auto — IP detection.
Highlights
- It provides real-time weather data as well as 14-day forecasts.
- It offers up to 20,000 free calls per month.
- It has quick response times (200ms).
- It supports JSON and XML formats.
- Additional services include time zone, astronomy, sports, currency, and map API.
Iteris ClearAg Weather Data API
The Iteris ClearAg Weather API is powered by ClearAg’s meteorological data, sensor data, and weather models to provide dynamic weather data. The field weather API suite has five different components, namely: Current and Forecast Weather, Weather Map Tile Overlay, Hail History, Historical and Climatological Weather, and lastly Sensor Integration.
Other than the weather API, ClearAg offers a range of agribusiness APIs, making it a top choice for users in the agricultural sector.
Highlights
- It provides different types of weather data including air temperature, wind speed, humidity, precipitation, evapotranspiration, and more.
- It covers any location worldwide.
- It supports interactive maps suitable for both mobile and web-based applications.
- It provides JSON formatted weather data.
There you go! Use any of the above APIs to meet your personal and enterprise weather needs.
