Suggestion: Visual Cross Weather Data Services
I was having a lot of trouble with how to get enough historical weather data for this project I’m working on. As I’m just learning about API and how to use requests and json in Python, what I’m pulling from the API is fairly basic.
On any given day in the 2011 soccer* seanson was it raining in Berlin, Germany?
*I’m American, so football is soccer. I’m sorry
Dark Sky API isn’t taking any new sign ups, so I had to find other sources. The first one I found was Open Weather Map , and after I wrote out everything… I realized their historical data only goes back 5 days!!!! Since it’s 2021, that’s not going to work for data from 2011. Ultimately found Visual Cross Weather Data Services and it works perfectly for what I need it for and will be a go to in the future for all kinds of historical weather data!
Some cool things I figured out along the way…
Making sure I’m getting a 200 response when calling APIs (see code below).
Coverting a datetime string into a UNIX timestamp. I don’t have an exact time in this, but if you need an exact time… it has to first be converted to UTC time:
import time
import datetime
datetime_string = "2020-01-20"
dt = str(time.mktime(datetime.datetime.strptime(datetime_string, "%Y-%m-%d").timetuple()))[:9]
dt
Using classes. I’m still learning this one, but here’s the first part:
class WeatherGetter():
def __init__(self):
self.secret_key = "[Personal API Key]"
self.berlin_lat = "52.520007"
self.berlin_lon = "13.404954"
self.location = 'Berlin,GR'
self.url_base = "https://weather.visualcrossing.com/VisualCrossingWebServices/rest/services/timeline"
def get_weather_data_for_date(self, datetime_string, verbose=True):
full_url = "{}/{}%2C%20{}/{}?unitGroup=us&key={}"
.format(self.url_base, self.berlin_lat, self.berlin_lon, datetime_string, self.secret_key)
response = requests.get(full_url)
if response.status_code == 200:
if verbose:
print(response.status_code)
return response
else:
raise ValueError("Error getting data from Visual Crossing API: Response Code {}"
.format(response.status_code))
That’s all I have for now.