best_bike_days
Description
Fetches weather data and displays current weather on the command line, current weather in an external window, and computes a response determining if there are upcoming days where the weather conditions are worth taking a few hours off to go biking.
There are three applications in this repo:
- current_weather_v2.py - Opens an external window where the user can search for current weather via GUI.
- current_weather.py - Creates a simple, organized table via command line showing the current weather of a specified city.
- best_bike_days.py - Returns command line table of recommendations for biking days based on the 16-day weather forecast of a specified city.
Daily weather forecasts that result in a recommendation for biking require the following conditions:
- Temperature between 55-85 °F
- Wind speed no more than 15 mph
- No preciptation for the day and less than 0.2 inches of precipitation in the previous 24 hours
- Acceptable wind gusts and satisfactory apparent temperature / real feel
Usage
- Obtain a free API key from https://openweathermap.org/ and add it to a new file "api_key.txt". This is necessary for all the applications.
- For the GUI (current_weather_v2.py), just run the file.
- For the command line interface applications (current_weather.py and best_bike_days.py), set the 'city' variable at the bottom of the file to your city name and run the python file. The string can just be '{city}', or it can be '{city},{state},{country}'. For example: 'Arlington' or 'Arlington,VA,US'. By just using the city, openweathermap may return the wrong weather data since not all city names are unique. Therefore, it is recommended to use city, state, and country.
Weather API details
- In both versions of current_weather.py, data is fetched from https://openweathermap.org/ for the current day.
- In best_bike_days.py, the specified city is geocoded through the geocoding API from https://openweathermap.org/, and the returned coordinates are used to fetch the 16-day weather forecast from https://open-meteo.com/.
- Originally, openweathermap was considered for a multi-day forecast, but their free API only provides multi-day forecast in the form of 5 day / 3 hour forecast data (an exessive 40 sets of data limited to only 5 days). The 16 day forecast, which is more suitable, requires a paid subscription - so instead, open-meteo is used as it provides a 16-day forecast free of charge.
Output
Current weather version 2 GUI:
Current weather version 2 menubar:
Current weather version 2 menu items:
Current weather:
Best bike days recommendations:
Future Updates
Next steps are to upgrade the 16-day best bike days forecast from a command line output to a GUI interface like current_weather_v2.py.
Reference
Open Weather Map website: https://openweathermap.org/
Current weather API call docs: https://openweathermap.org/current/
Geocoding API call docs: https://openweathermap.org/api/geocoding-api/
Open-Meteo weather API call docs: https://open-meteo.com/en/docs/