Investing in Infrastructure For Your Business – The One Thing You’ve Overlooked

If your business has any component that you deal with offline, the weather is going to affect your business. Whether you run a restaurant or a utility company, you have to make way for inclement weather conditions when you run your business.

Inclement weather can affect businesses to the tune of $630 billion every year. Consumer behavior, sales, jobs, operations, and logistics are the most affected components of companies, and not accounting for these changes can significantly affect your bottom line. 

Adding a weather API is precisely what you’ve been missing in your planning. If you get an estimate of the weather, you can avoid setting outdoor tasks on rainy days, and you’ll get alerts on weather-related delays you might experience.

You’ll be able to warn your customers about delays you get alerts for, and it will show your clients that you put in that extra effort to ensure a smooth and seamless interaction. 

The market is filled with weather APIs that you can integrate into your business. However, there are some which have features that set them apart from the rest.

If you want the best experience for yourself, your business, and your clients, you should check out the following weather API reviews. 

Best Overall: ClimaCell

ClimaCell offers some excellent features packed into a tiny package. You get numerical data, map layers, hyper-local weather updates, and even minute-by-minute updates on weather patterns.

You’ll be able to track air-quality in targeted areas, and you can even check out the weather in real-time. Finally, ClimaCell also gives you the weather history of the site and forecasts about any place across the globe. Talk about multifunctional! 

ClimaCell gets its data from IoT devices, internet-connected vehicles, and virtual sensors from as many places as it is possible to get data. The API also includes information about road risks, lighting conditions, and a fire index for wildfires.

You can integrate it using Amazon Web Services and Autodesk. ClimaCell also works using REST API if you use JSON for the requests and responses, and it also has HTTPS support. Basically, everything you want in a weather API plus some bonuses. 

Strong Contenders

OpenWeatherMap

OpenWeatherMap uses data from over 40,000 weather stations worldwide and a wide range of meteorological broadcast services. It comes with a free option where you can access the data for five days and up to 3 hours for your targeted location.

OpenWeatherMap crowdsources their data, and the free version limits you to only 60 API calls every minute. This is an excellent option for those looking for a free service that gets the job mostly done without bothering too much about the drawbacks or lapses in data. 

OpenWeatherMap supports both JSON and XML. They offer both free and enterprise subscriptions, so pricing varies depending on your usage. 

Weatherbit 

Weatherbit offers 5 APIs that target weather forecasts, historical weather records, air quality data, soil temperature data, and soil moisture data.

Weatherbit API pulls data from traditional sources like weather stations and uses artificial intelligence to make predictions about forecasts. There are both free and paid versions that you can choose, depending on your usage. 

The free version limits you to only a single API key, though you will get 95% uptime and a high response rate from their servers. The free version also limits you to 500 API calls a day.

In terms of integration, WeatherBit supports JSON. If you want HTTPS, you’ll have to shell out for their paid subscription. Having said that, if your focus is on agriculture, then this is a great option. 

Weather2020 

Are you more invested in long-term forecasts? If so, Weather2020 might be the option for you. Based on the forecasting model of the famous meteorologist Gary Lezak, Weather2020’s unique selling point is the fact that it claims to be able to predict the weather for 12 weeks.

In terms of app integration, you are limited to JSON. There are both free and premium subscriptions you can choose from, with certain limits placed on free subscriptions. 

A free account limits you to 1000 API calls per day. Every additional call will incur a cost of $0.002, which is quite reasonable if you know approximately what your usage will be.

Paid subscriptions start at $9.99 monthly, which is one of the lowest that you might see. Before you invest in this, you should draw your own conclusions about the reliability or accuracy of the forecast beyond the 10-day mark! 

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