Best free API for weather records: ERA5!

In my job as a data scientist, once I needed to add detailed records of weather data to my project. I wanted things like, temperature, humidity, rainfall, etc given the spacetime coordinates (time and GPS location).

I thought that finding an API that could give this type of information was going to be easy. I didn’t know that weather data are one of the most jealously kept type of data.

If you search for “free weather API”, you will see plenty of similar websites with different services that are not actually free or have no historical weather records.

I really need to search long and hard before finding the Climate Data Store (CDS) web site.

What is the CDS?

The CDS is a service provided by the EU that offers all climate records from any part of the work with an easy python program: ERA5.

The ERA5 is a reanalysis dataset model that provides hourly weather data from 1979 to 2019, free of use, no limitation on the API, and in python, BINGO!

What you need to do is to sign up to the website, copy the CDS API key and install it.

The service is so well done that you can use this page link to select what kind of data you want by selecting the period and format. Press “Show API request” and it will show the exact Python code needed to download the data…