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Gareth Goh
By Gareth Goh
Gareth Goh
Gareth Goh
Gareth Goh is a product marketing manager at Tomorrow.io, working on the company's enterprise and SMB products. He previously worked at DataRobot, an AI startup, and InsightSquared, a sales analytics startup, in the Boston area. When he isn't diving into weather technology he enjoys spending time with his young baby and watching sports.
Nov 8, 2023· 4 min, 54 sec

Uncover Actionable Trends with Tomorrow.io’s Historical Weather API

    The value of historical weather data is immense.

    Albeit, weather forecasting, by its very name and nature, implies looking forward and predicting what the weather will look like tonight, tomorrow, or even a week later.

    But how do we inform those forecasts?

    With current weather data and past trend analyses.

    In fact, meteorologists depend on both current observations and past historical data to inform their sophisticated weather models. These models ultimately dictate the forecast claims of “Cloudy with a high of 75 degrees,” widely consumed by the public.

    Meanwhile, decision-makers in all industries have often relied on historical data of all types to help them understand historical weather trends. From farmers and construction workers to sports leagues and airlines, accessing past weather data and knowing its effects on business is crucial to running optimal operations.

    The Power of Tomorrow.io’s Historical Weather API

    At Tomorrow.io, we understand the value of this data and want to provide users with streamlined access to those data points.

    We are thrilled to share a few updates to our Historical Weather API data offerings to support developers and business leaders in accessing the weather data they need to support their organizations.

    Users will now have access to instant synchronous programmatic hourly and daily historical weather data for any location for a specific time frame, up to seven years in the past!

    And that’s not all; Tomorrow.io now offers a variety of historical weather data through:

    • Recent-History Weather Data — Using the recent history weather API, you can access historical weather data for your location, including minute-by-minute, hourly, and daily data for the last seven days.
    • Historical Archive — Tomorrow.io’s Historical Weather API allows you to query weather conditions by specifying the location, fields, timestamps, and the start and end to include a historical timeline up to 20 years in the past.
    • Climate Normals — Climate Normals is a comprehensive view of climate patterns over a 20-year period, presenting data for the period between 2000 and 2020.

    With the Tomorrow.io historical weather API, you can empower your teams to make a greater business impact across any industry.

    The Value of Historical Weather Data

    Tomorrow.io has partnered with dozens of industry titans to help them manage the impact of weather and generate better business outcomes based on weather.

    One thing we’ve heard over and over consistently across all the different industries we work with is just how valuable it is to have access to historical weather data.

    Convenient and programmatic access via our sophisticated and powerful historical weather API will accelerate the application of this data to use cases that provide significant business impact:

    • Insurance Companies and other organizations dealing with claims and liabilities need historical weather data to investigate those claims. Accurate, hyper-local historical data significantly minimizes payouts to fraudulent claims while maximizing profitability and understanding of pricing and leverage.
    • Logistics and Transportation companies can utilize historical data to understand better the impact of high-impact and severe weather conditions on shipping delays, pushes/cancellations, SLA adherence, and more. All of which help to mitigate future disruptions while enabling more efficient operational planning and simultaneously increasing customer satisfaction.
    • Sports Teams and Stadium Operators can directly correlate past retail merchandise sales at events with the weather, allowing them to manage inventory and craft forward-looking promotions that bring in additional revenue for pro sports teams.
    • On-Demand Companies like Uber can leverage historical data to analyze the impact of weather on consumer and rider demand, availability of drivers, traffic delays, and much more, all of which can help on-demand services optimizefuture operations, routes, staffing, and incentives. The same goes for on-demand food delivery as well, informing delivery drivers of weather delays is crucial.
    • Aviation and Airline Operators can retrospectively look at previous weather events to analyze delays, cancellations, and staffing. In fact, JetBlue uses Tomorrow.io for this exact reason and is saving $300k a month, $3.7M in a year on operational costs. Having a holistic view of a past weather event is crucial to planning and mitigating future weather impacts to create a more efficient operation.
    • Energy and Utilities can correlate past weather data with power outage locations to optimize future staffing and can use weather trends to scope out future outages due to storms. Historical data can also improve models for wind generation and inform pricing by understanding the impact of weather on usage patterns.

    These use cases are just scratching the surface of what’s possible when leveraging historical weather data for trend analysis. This data powers predictive models and can uncover significant trends that make a huge business impact.

    Accessing Historical Weather Data

    Tomorrow.io’s historical weather API provides people, businesses, and governments with the best weather data archive available to unleash the power of past weather data sets on their organization’s desired outcomes and correlate it with past occurrences.

    The historical weather API is accessed similarly to Tomorrow.io’s other API endpoints, using the endpoint:

    POST /v4/historical

    Users can request up to a full month’s worth of data in a single call with access to point locations, polygons up to 10k square km, and polylines up to 2k km long.

    The following weather parameters are available for historical access, and you can learn about more weather parameters in Tomorrow.io’s documentation.

    Tomorrow.io users can now leverage our historical weather API to access daily historical weather data for any location for a specific time frame, up to seven years in the past!

    And just like with our regular API, users must simply select their parameters for location, fields, and timestamps and get instant synchronous access to the historical data at the time and location of their choice.

    Conclusion

    Historical weather data provides a comprehensive view of weather patterns and climate trends through history. With our historical weather API, users gain reliable weather data to inform forecasts for future weather conditions, enhance decision-making, and gain a clearer picture of past weather.

    With the insights we gain through a historical weather API, people, businesses, and governments can prepare for the future with an understanding of past weather impact.

    Sign Up for the Tomorrow.io Weather API for Free

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