An incredibly simple API to look up how good a city's climate is.
Once on a cold and rainy Moscow evening, I asked myself which city on Earth has the most comfortable (for me) temperature range. I pulled up the browser: surely there must be a search engine for that, right? Some API that lets you search by highest/lowest yearly temperature? Turns out, the best source available for this kind of data is Wikipedia weatherboxes: they were hand gathered from websites of various government agencies and coerced to a standard format.
"Too cold; didn't move" is a tool that parses Wikipedia weatherboxes and exposes a very brief summary of each city's climate as an API to facilitate all kinds of research. It could be integrated into some search engine for cities like NomadList, for example.
Request
curl -X GET --header 'Accept: application/json' 'https://toocold.herokuapp.com/climate?city=Budapest'
Response
{
"city": "Budapest",
"upper-bound": 26.7,
"average-high": 15.325000000000001,
"average-low": 8.649999999999999,
"lower-bound": 0
}
application/edn, application/x-yaml work as well. Temperatures are in Celcius. For US cities, temperatures are converted to Celcius. We only do Celcius here. If there's any ambiguity on what to call a city, just check with Wikipedia: city names are just names of their corresponding articles.
There is also Swagger-based interactive documentation.
- Perth, Australia is not currently supported. In the meantime, feel free to use the original weatherbox.
- There is no caching strategy yet: all requests go straight to Wikipedia. If you're making a lot of requests, please cache on your side. This helps the environment, Wikipedia and my free Heroku dyno.
Copyright © 2017 Vadim Liventsev
Distributed under the MIT License, see LICENSE.