Where Can I Find Historical Weather Data for Any City?

Weather data is very common data that is frequently used in web and mobile applications. Although there are many use cases where this data is used and even many businesses that provide services based on this data, we see that weather data is generally used to increase user satisfaction. In particular, we often come across live, forecast, and historical weather data in a dashboard or widget in applications. Many businesses use the best weather API to obtain data presented on their dashboards.

Among weather data, historical weather data attracts much attention. It is used in very important areas such as aviation, travel, agriculture, and artificial intelligence projects. Therefore, the demand for historical weather data is increasing day by day. The increase in demand for this data has directly increased the number of APIs serving in this field. Today, we will talk about the importance of historical weather data offered by a good weather API. Then, we will list reliable APIs that provide these data and use one of them in Python.

Why is Historical Weather Data Important?

Historical weather data refers to a data pool source created by collecting and storing meteorological information recorded in past years. This data is actively used to track and analyze the historical performance of weather conditions, climate trends, and even changes.

Historical weather data has become of great importance for many sectors and fields in recent times. First, these data play a vital role in climate change research. Historical weather data provides scientists with a valuable tool to understand climate changes and predict future changes. These data are also used for strategic planning by agriculture, energy production, construction, tourism, healthcare, and many other sectors.

Here are some common examples of the importance and benefits of historical weather data for businesses:

  • Climate Change Monitoring: Historical weather data is used to monitor the signs and effects of climate change.
  • Agriculture and Crop Management: Farmers and agricultural industries use historical weather data to optimally grow agricultural products.
  • Energy Planning: Energy producers use weather data to optimize energy demand and production.
  • Tourism and Travel Planning: Travel agencies plan holidays and events according to weather conditions and do marketing according to this data.
  • Natural Disaster Forecasts: Many non-governmental organizations use historical weather data to predict the likelihood of natural disasters and prepare.
  • Construction and Infrastructure Planning: Construction companies consider historical weather data for durability and safety in infrastructure projects.

What are the Most Favorite Historical Weather Data APIs?

In this section, we will list some of the favorite weather APIs that provide historical weather data that businesses and developers use safely.

The weatherstack API

home page of the weatherstack historical weather data api

The weatherstack is a weather API used by 75,000 companies. This API is very well-equipped.

The weatherstack API provides users with historical, live, and forecast weather data with high accuracy. It is quite simple to use. It also provides weather data according to any city. It stands out as a very suitable weather API for global use, as it supports millions of cities around the world. It provides historical data up to 2008 with high accuracy and speed.

OpenWeatherMap API

home page of the opeanweathermap api

OpenWeatherMap API is known as one of the most popular weather APIs in the market.

OpenWeatherMap API provides live and forecast weather data as well as historical weather data by city. With the history endpoint it offers, it parametrically obtains the latitude, longitude, and time fields of the city and provides high-accuracy historical weather data. The data it provides includes fields such as ‘wind’, ‘humidity’, and ‘pressure’. It provides 40 years of historical data for the cities it supports.

Tomorrow.io API

home page of the tomorrow.io api

Tomorrow.io API is one of the most preferred weather APIs in the market because it provides 20 years of historically accurate weather data.

Tomorrow.io API is an easy-to-use, highly flexible weather API. It provides a very detailed JSON response by taking fields such as city coordinates, historical time, and timestep as parameters in the request body. It is a very developer-friendly API. To reduce the network traffic in those applications, its API takes the ‘fields’ parameter from the client in the API POST request and returns only the fields specified to the client.

Weatherbit API

home page of the weatherbit api

Weatherbit is one of the most reliable weather APIs of recent times. It is an API that provides the highest accuracy of weather data. It is supported by more than 120,000 weather stations.

It is a powerful weather API that also provides historical weather data. With that historical weather endpoint, it provides historical weather conditions with both latitude/longitude and city name. The historical weather data response it provides is also quite detailed. Its response includes unique fields such as temperature, pressure, dew point, wind speed, precipitation, snowfall, cloud cover, and much more. This API is preferred by organizations such as Toyota, Slack, and the United States Department of State.

How to Get Historical Weather Data By City with a Weather API?

In this part, we will integrate one of the most reliable weather APIs that provide historical weather data by city in the market into Python. For this application, let’s use the weatherstack API, which we can integrate into all programming languages and offers a fast integration experience.

To access historical weather data from the weatherstack API, we will sign up for its Standard Plan or higher plans and obtain an API key.

After registration, let’s open a file named ‘historical-weather-data-by-city.py’ and put weatherstack’s integration codes into it:

import requests

url = “https://api.weatherstack.com/historical?access_key=WEATHERSTACK-API-KEY&query=Istanbul&historical_date=2015-01-21&hourly=1”

payload={}
headers = {}

response = requests.request(“GET”, url, headers=headers, data=payload)

print(response.text)

Let’s put our API key in the ‘WEATHERSTACK-API-KEY’ field and run the application with the following command:

python historical-weather-data-by-city.py

After running the application, we get the historical weather data of the city of Istanbul on an hourly basis on 2015-01-21 from the weatherstack API as follows:

json response of the weatherstack historical weather data api

Conclusion

Ultimately, an effective way to find historical weather data for any city is to use weather APIs that provide weather data. Many of these APIs are designed to provide current and historical weather data and have broad geographic coverage. Weather APIs give developers and researchers access to historical weather information for cities of their choice. Using these APIs, researchers and developers can easily and quickly get historical weather data and access detailed weather information for the cities they want.

FAQs

Q: What is the Historical Weather Data?

A: Historical weather data refers to recorded data of various meteorological measurements of weather conditions in past periods, such as temperature, humidity, precipitation, wind speed, and direction.

Q: What are Some Common Use Cases of Historical Weather Data?

A: Historical weather data is widely used in many different fields today. Some of these are as follows:

  • Climate Change Research,
  • Agriculture
  • Energy Sector Planning
  • Construction Projects
  • Aviation
  • Logistic
  • Tourism and Travel Planning

Q: Does the weatherstack Support Bulk Query?

A: Yes, it does. The weatherstack API can provide weather data for more than one location with a single endpoint.

Q: Does the weatherstack Provide Historical Weather Data For Any City?

A: Yes, it does. The weatherstack API is a global historical weather data API that supports millions of cities.

Vivek is a published author of Meidilight and a cofounder of Zestful Outreach Agency. He is passionate about helping webmaster to rank their keywords through good-quality website backlinks. In his spare time, he loves to swim and cycle. You can find him on Twitter and Linkedin.