GlobalWeather

GlobalWeather is a new and improved version of our popular AirportWeather Web service. This Web service returns detailed, strong-typed and time-stamped weather data, and returns results much faster than AirportWeather. You can search for valid weather stations by station codes, country, latitude, longitude, elevation, name or region. You can also use the isValidCode operation to validate a particular code.

Once you've got a valid weather station code, you can use the getWeatherReport operation to return a detailed data set that includes more weather-related information than you could ever require: precipitation, atmospheric pressure, cloud cover, wind, temperature, visibility, and so on.

This Web service works by downloading a batch file from NOAA in the background each hour, updating a data repository. Queries are then made against this repository. Another advantage of GlobalWeather is that the getWeatherReport method will accept ICAO, IATA/FAA, & WMO identifiers. The previous AirportWeather only accepted ICAO codes. The IATA/FAA designations are more commonly known (for example, for Dublin airport, the ICAO code is EIDW, while the IATA code is DUB).

In the returned weather data, the date and time is Coordinated Universal Time (UTC), also known as "Z-Time". Note that this weather may be up to two hours old, as we're dependent on the National Weather Service for data. As their site indicates:

In the U.S., METAR (a French acronym which which roughly translates as Aviation Routine Weather Report) reports are taken once an hour between 50 minutes past the hour and the top of the (next) hour. All the observations taken within this time are considered to be for the same cycle. For example, observations taken between 1150Z and 1200Z are all considered to be 12Z observations. In reality, observations may be taken a little earlier or a little later. In addition, observations taken due to changing conditions, known as SPECI reports, are also considered to occur for a given cycle.

The current cycle file (there is one cycle file for each hour) may be unavailable or incomplete until the end of the cycle.

The weather service data is provided by the US Government's National Weather Service. This data is freely available and reuseable, but is non-copyrightable in its raw form.

The following are IATA/FAA designations for some popular airports:

• JFK - New York JFK
• LAX - Los Angeles Intl.
• DUB - Dublin, Ireland
• HKG - Hong Kong Intl.
• AMS - Amsterdam
• LHR - London Heathrow
• SYD - Sydney Intl.
• TYO - Tokyo Intl.
• CAI - Cairo

Alternately, you can go to http://www.iata.org/codes/ to find your local aiport.

Technical Details