Tomorrow.io’s Air Quality API: Take a Closer Look at Air Quality
Access historical, current, and forecast air pollution data for any location quickly and easily.
The Value of an Air Quality API
Air pollution plays a huge role in social health, community activity, and business operations. Poor air quality affects lung health and increases patient hospital visits. Pollen in the air aggravates allergies and keeps consumers indoors. Local fires impact air quality and make it difficult for people to breathe. Extreme low humidity causes sore dry throats and causes coughing.
Tomorrow.io’s Air Quality API provides insights and air quality data in order to help businesses prepare for upcoming events. With data collected from the API, numerous industries can determine when air pollution could be a factor in health issues, allergies, medical bills, paid time off requests, absences, and other productivity impacting situations.
Access Hyperlocal, High-Resolution Air Pollution Data
Wind impacts air pollution as pollutants travel to new locations bringing different levels of quality across a region, but wth Tomorrow.io’s Weather API’s hyperlocal data, users can pinpoint air quality more granularly in a direct small area of a city, for example. Using granular data from the Tomorrow.io Air Quality API, enterprise organizations can get dispersed air quality analytics across a large region and pinpoint areas where air pollution affects the most residents.
And air quality is just one of the data layers Tomorrow.io’s Air Quality API offers. Developers building analytics tools may also leverage the pollen and fire endpoints, as these offer detection data that could be valuable in determining air quality. These factors and more have a large impact on residents and businesses in the affected area, as both individuals and organizations are caught in a domino effect of poor air quality.
Uncover Exclusive Environmental Insights to Optimize Operations
Tomorrow.io’s Air Quality API offers EPA index parameters and numerous data points in order to predict and take action based on air quality data.
To start, you first need to know which event you want to monitor. You could use custom queries that pull air quality data, but Tomorrow.io Air Pollution API users can ultimately approach this challenge in several different ways, most of which leverage the Insights collection.
The quickest way to get insights on severe weather events is to use the Events endpoint. This endpoint pulls data based on pre-made severe weather events. Let’s say that you want to get information about fires to determine if air quality will be low for a specific area. You could make a Python call like the one below.
Notice in the GET request that the insights parameter is set to fires. The insights parameter is used to define the event that you want to retrieve based on the location value defined in the location parameter.
import requests
url = "https://api.tomorrow.io/v4/events?location=YOUR_LOCATION&insights=fires&buffer=1&apikey=YOUR_KEY"
headers = {"Accept": "application/json"}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers)
print(response.text)
Another option for this scenario is to work with the air event. The air insight category lets you know when there is dense smoke, dust, air stagnation, blowing dust or a dust storm. All these events could be from fires, but the air insight category gives you details about low air quality that could be from numerous other weather events.
import requests
url = "https://api.tomorrow.io/v4/events?location=YOUR_LOCATION&insights=air&buffer=1&apikey=YOUR_KEY"
headers = {"Accept": "application/json"}
response = requests.request("GET", url, headers=headers)
print(response.text)
Take Action Based on Air Quality Data and Trends
Air quality has an enormous impact on human health. In fact, it’s often used in hospitals and doctor offices to determine underlying reasons for allergies and breathing difficulties. And this use case is just the beginning—organizations in all industries can leverage Tomorrow.io’s Air Quality API. The insights category is a great start towards understanding air quality in your local area and the ways it affects business.
Weather API Capabilities
Learn more about the Tomorrow.io Weather API’s enterprise-grade capabilities:
Leverage our Air Quality API for a Variety of Use Cases
One way users can take advantage of Tomorrow.io’s Weather API to examine air quality during peak allergy seasons for healthcare purposes. The annual cost of allergies is more than $18 billion each year, yet the majority of treatment revolves around reacting to pollen and other allergens. Data from Tomorrow.io’s Air Pollution API could help healthcare organizations prepare for allergy treatments by examining data for high humidity, low humidity, rain, pollen count, and unhealthy air quality. This information could aid professionals in identifying seasonal peaks in order to prepare for the surge in demand for medication and treatment.
Pharmaceutical and health retailers also leverage weather data to predict when certain medications will be more seasonally popular and offer promotions. Retail stores could use insights into air quality to place over-the-counter medications more prominently in front of the store when conditions peak in order to maximize visibility and revenue.
