IBM Insights for Weather available in Bluemix

In June of this year, IBM and The Weather Company announced their new strategic partnership to bring unmatched capabilities of weather data to its clients, joining The Weather Company’s weather data, forecasting and analytical models together with IBM’s deep expertise in combining weather data and analytics to bring real value to the market.

In September, IBM announced the availability of IBM Insights for Weather, a set of data services that tap into the breadth and depth of The Weather Company’s forecast and historical observational data.

While IBM solution teams and Watson Analytics continue to deepen our weather-based solutions, IBM is proud to announce that we are now placing the capability to unlock value with weather data into the hands of the Bluemix developer community, IBM’s platform for cloud services and development.

APIs Provide Forecast and Observational Data

Weather is perhaps the single largest external swing factor in business performance across many industries and is responsible for significant economic impact worldwide, costing up to $500 million in the US alone each year. IBM Insights for Weather for Bluemix enables you to easily incorporate weather data into your application, allowing you to retrieve daily observed weather data and forecasts for a specified time range, based on postal code or geolocation with worldwide coverage. The APIs include:

• Real-time weather updates for current weather conditions, including temperature, wind direction and speed, humidity, pressure, visibility and more! Updates include a sensible weather phrase and a matching weather icon.
• Hourly forecasts for the next 24 hours, including descriptive forecast text.
• Daily forecasts for the next 10 day period, including forecast narrative text string of up to 256 characters with appropriate units of measure for the location and in the language requested.
• Historical weather data for the previous 24 hours, based on weather data from site-based observation stations.

Easily Enrich Web and Mobile Applications

Developing weather-enabled applications is now easier than ever. Insights for Weather for Bluemix supports a set of REST APIs and provides weather data in JSON format, which means any cloud developer can embed weather data with worldwide coverage with ease, without the hassle of setup, maintenance and operation.

Access to the weather data includes both free and paid service tiers, with monthly pricing based on the number of API calls per day that you make to the service.

Read the getting started documentation and access the no-charge tier to begin experimenting enhancing your applications with weather capabilities.