Introduction

2016-11-11

The WXT Weather Service

Description

The WXT Weather Service is a web service providing atmospheric weather information and other ancillary data from a variety of sources through a REST interface.

It has the ability to instantly provide current weather forecast information on demand for almost anywhere in the world. This works by downloading elements from a current realisation of the Global Forecast System numeric weather model and processing them in a manner that allows quick and efficient access to individual values.

The service is also capable of producing derived information in a number of ways, and complements the weather data with other useful items such as METAR/TAF information, sun and moon calculations, etc.

Its primary use is as a flexible and convenient to access source of weather data for third party software, with a focus on applications requiring upper air data, such as aviation, the energy industry, etc.

Target Audience

The WXT Weather Service is not aimed at end users, but rather to application developers who add in their software the capability to communicate with the WXT Service and use the results in further processing, or present them to the user through their own interface.

The service has applications in the fields of flight planning, land transportation, logistics, agriculture, and general weather forecasting.

Main Features

• Uncomplicated: Most of our endpoints are simple HTTP GET requests using TLS (HTTPS) and basic authentication. You can literally start using the API in seconds.

• Efficient: You may retrieve data for multiple locations, epochs, elements, or any combination thereof in a single, compact request, or you may fire off multiple requests, whichever fits better your usage scenarios.

• Economical: We provide a variety of plans to cater to every user. You pay just for what you need.

• Powerful: Advanced users may run arbitrarily complex queries on our servers and receive the results almost instantly.

Technical advantages

• Four dimensions: We are not limited to surface data, but instead provide data from ground level up to about 32 km up (FL1000 / 100,000 ft / 1 hPa), making our service suitable, e.g., for use by flight planning software to give a better estimate of flight time and fuel consumption en route, and to optimise both, e.g., by choosing the most rapid or economical route and flight level according to the forecast winds.

• Advanced vertical datums: Apart from mean sea level, the user may reference directly and obtain information from certain other significant vertical layers, such as the freezing level or the tropopause.

• Get data for any point, any epoch: Although the base model is discrete, the server will perform any necessary interpolations for you.

Data highlights

• Winds aloft: WXT provides forecast winds aloft information up to 16 days in advance anywhere in the world, from the surface up to about 32 km above mean sea level.

• Temperature: It provides forecast temperature information in the atmosphere as well as on the ground, which assists flight planning, e.g., by estimating the risk of icing.

• Terrain and Geopotential Altitude: This service can estimate how high you are actually flying over the ground by correcting the barometric altitude by pressure and density and thus assist in determining terrain clearance, gliding range, driftdowns, etc.

• METAR and TAF Reports: In addition to the forecast data, the system also provides a feed of observed weather in the form of worldwide METAR data access, as well as TAF reports. METAR and TAF data is available for the last 72 hours and can be searched by ICAO identifier or geographic coordinates.

Premium features

• Weather alerts: Tell our service about an area of interest (a single point, a whole region, or even multiple disconnected regions) and a set of weather-related conditions you want to know about, and on every forecast update the service will process your request and send a report.

• Weather queries: We provide a premium service for advanced users, allowing them to run arbitrarily complex weather-related queries on our own servers, and receive the results.