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over 7 years ago

Sparkathon’s sky just opened up w/ more weather data

Guess what, Sparkathoners? We've got two great new climate data resources lined up for you. With your extended Bluemix trial, you can now access IBM Insights for Weather to incorporate data from The Weather Company into your Analytics for Apache Spark applications. And, our awesome promotional partner UrtheCast is granting free access to its Earth APIs for all Sparkathon registrants (that’s you!) for the duration of the hackathon.

Sweet! How do I get started with IBM Insights for Weather on Bluemix?

You can add weather observations and forecasts from The Weather Company to your Bluemix application and display weather data for an area that is specified by a geolocation by using the Insights for Weather RESTful APIs. The weather data allows your application to forecast, detect, and visualize disruptive weather events that might affect decision making in your application.

The Weather Company is the most comprehensive provider of historical and forecasted weather data for all forms of weather, including precipitation, barometric pressure, wind, lightning, and hail. Weather data is updated every 15 minutes by default, except in China and other specific regions, where weather data is updated hourly.

You can use the Insights for Weather REST APIs to retrieve the following information:

  • An hourly weather forecast for the next 24 hours that starts from the current time for a specified geolocation.
  • A daily weather forecast for the next 10 days that includes forecasts for the daytime and nighttime segments for a specified geolocation. This forecast includes the forecast narrative text string of up to 256 characters with appropriate units of measure for the location and in the language requested.
  • The current observed weather data for a specified geolocation. This weather data includes temperature, precipitation, wind direction and speed, humidity, barometric pressure, dew point, visibility, and ultraviolet (UV) radiation.
  • The observed weather data for a specified geolocation and a specified time range. This data is sourced from physical observation stations and synthetic weather observations, for example, Hurricane Imaging Radiometer (HiRAD). This API returns weather observations for current conditions and past observations up to and including the previous 24 hours.

There’s some great documentation waiting — go check it out!

But I want more climate data. Hook me up!

We can do that. Promotional partner UrtheCast’s platform and APIs allow you to programmatically access Earth observation satellite imagery data served as MapTiles. Combined with big data analytics machine learning algorithms, this data allows you to measure global, regional, and local soil humidity; snow pack; drought; floods; and the effects of weather over time. For information on how to sign up for free access, visit the Sparkathon resources page.

Questions?

We're all about questions. Post one to the discussion forum or email us at support@devpost.com.