Call for Code: The Weather Company and you

Exhaustive scientific research has confirmed changing weather and temperature patterns, rapidly rising sea levels, and an intensifying proliferation of extreme weather events around the world. The frequency of these weather events continue to increase year after year. And the impact they have on people and the amount of damage they cause are escalating.

Severe and devastating weather is not going away. It is only going to get worse, according to the National Climate Assessment. By the year 2100, global temperatures are projected to increase 3 to 5 degrees Celsius (5.4 to 9 degrees Fahrenheit).

Call for Code

Call for Code is a challenge to the world's developers. It aims to get global problem solvers thinking about social and humanitarian challenges like sustainability and climate change. Developers are called upon to use their skills to help address these issues, and often solutions seek to fight the climate crisis and lesson the impacts from changing weather.

For example, the 2020 Call for Code Grand Prize winner Agrolly created a solution that uses IBM Cloud Object Storage, IBM Watson Studio, IBM watsonx Assistant, and The Weather Company technologies to run climate risk assessments, which allows farmers with less resources available to them to still make more educated decisions, obtain the necessary financing, and improve their economic outcome.

The Weather Company

We cannot control the weather, but we can better understand it. In doing so, we can use data and analytics to get ahead of an occurrence and reduce the impact severe weather caused by climate change can have on our communities. We can better predict, prepare, and recover from extreme weather and climate impacts.

Solving problems where weather is involved, or more specifically any application that takes into account weather conditions, means we need access to the weather data itself.

Global weather data access is back

The Weather Company® has opened IBM Environment Intelligence Suite weather data APIs to developers who are participating in the Call for Code Global Challenge. It is free of charge for developers to use as they're building their submissions.

The IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite is an AI-powered SaaS solution that provides organizations with timely and fact-based actionable intelligence to proactively plan and manage the economic impact of severe weather and climate change events; built on the world’s most accurate weather data. Monitor for disruptive environmental conditions such as severe weather, wildfires, flooding and air quality, and send alerts when detected.

• Predict potential impacts of climate change and weather across the business using climate risk analytics
• Gain insights into potential operational disruptions and prioritize mitigation and response efforts
• Measure and report on environmental initiatives and operationalize carbon accounting, while reducing the burden of this reporting on procurement and operations teams

IBM Environmental Intelligence Suite provides two main API offerings:

The Standard APIs include essential weather APIs:

• Utility APIs for location services
• Core APIs for alerts, daily, weekly, intraday, monthly and imagery forecast
• Enhanced current conditions APIs for historical and on-demand data
• Enhanced forecast APIs for 15 days, hourly, 15 minute, precipitation, snowfall and analytical forecasts
• Lifestyle indices APIs for air quality, pollen, US Flu outbreak, US tides, breathing index, driving difficulty, ski index, UV index, watering needs and many more
• Severe weather APIs for local/tropical storms, earthquakes and power disruption data
• History on-demand APIs for direct, archived, analytics historical data
• Agriculture APIs for frost, degree and watering need data

Please visit the Standard APIs documentation for detailed information about the APIs and their usage.

The Premium APIs are the add-on APIs for the Standard APIs and can be subscribed to if required. They include:

• Enhanced current condition and forecast with APIs for gridded and polygonal observations, forecast and imagery data
• Severe weather APIs with radar-derived hail, rain, ice, shear, snow visions data, as well as tropical cyclone probability, and imagery data of wildfire and smoke
• History on-demand APIs with extended data
• Seasonal forecast APIs with imagery gridded and polygonal seasonal/sub-seasonal forecast
• Agriculture APIs with crop type lookup, 15 days hourly and solar energy forecast
• Renewables APIs for solar and wind forecast
• Probabilistic forecast API

Please visit the Premium APIs documentation for detailed information about the APIs and their usage.

Developers will be able to quickly add weather data such as severe weather alerts, tropical storm forecasts, power disruption index, and more into their innovative climate change solutions.

Getting started with the Weather APIs

To access and use the Weather APIs, you must first register for an API Key. Registration is free and will be available while the Call for Code Challenge is taking place. After you agree to the terms, you will receive your API key.

You can review the API documentation of Standard APIs and Premium APIs to see the list of available endpoints and detailed information on these endpoints. The documentation can also help you determine which endpoints are right for your application.

Please note not all the available APIs are global. Some APIs have restrictions for use in certain regions or countries. Refer to the terms and conditions for API availability and restrictions.

Using the API requires you to make a GET request to the appropriate endpoint. The request must include the API key and any parameters required by the endpoint. For example, getting the short-range "NowCast" for Ridgewood, NJ (ZipCode: 07450) would look something like this (using curl):

curl -X GET "https://api.weather.com/v1/location/07450:4:US/forecast/nowcast.json?language=en-US&units=e&apiKey=WXYZ" -H "accept: application/json"

Where WXYZ is the API key you received from registration.

Learning by doing

GitHub repositories with sample applications that use the API endpoints are available online for you to gain inspiration from and see them in action. The repositories also provide a starting point for creating an application. The sample code demonstrates how you can query and process responses from the following endpoints:

• Daily Almanac API: The almanac information is sourced from National Weather Service observation stations and provided by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) from time periods spanning 10 to 30 years or more.
• Weather Alerts - Headlines API: Provides weather watches, warnings, statements and advisories that are issued by the National Weather Service (NWS), Environment Canada, and MeteoAlarm.
• Daily Forecast API: Returns the geocode weather forecasts for the current day in the API endpoint.
• Severe Weather Power Disruption Index 15 Day: Provides insight that indicates the potential for power disruptions due to weather.
• Tropical Forecast - Projected Path: Provides the ability to query the single projected path per active storm.
• Weather Alerts Detail: Provides weather watches, warnings, statements, and advisories issued by the NWS, Environment Canada, and MeteoAlarm.

If you need help or have questions please join the Call for Code Slack community and post your questions on the #twc-weather-api-support channel.

How you and other developers can make a difference

Have a solution for a more effective severe weather preparedness system or how to predict long-range climate impacts from historical weather patterns? Whatever your idea may be, answer the call.

Interested in building a solution that can have an immediate and lasting impact to help with environmental sustainability? Join the 2023 Call for Code Global Challenge.

You can make a difference!

Va Barbosa and Raj Singh contributed to this blog.