OpenWeatherMap weather data for a smart home. Relative humidity

Generally speaking, humidity is the amount of water contained in the air. And relative humidity is the ratio of the mass fraction of water vapor in the air to the maximum possible value of this quantity at a given temperature.

Usually the notion “climate” includes temperature and precipitation. Often such factor as relative humidity is forgotten. It’s necessary to mention that basically one pays little attention to that parameter. Temperature, wind speed, pressure – in this range air humidity is an outsider and improperly deprived of attention. However relative humidity is not only one of the most important articles in weather forecasts, but also one of the defining factors of well-being.

What are the risks behind low and high humidity indoor? 
The atmosphere at home defines the health of house inhabitants a lot. To maintain optimal humidity at home is a necessary condition of good well-being. Too arid or too moist air indoor quickly becomes a source of significant troubles. 
The air indoor is very dry in the heating season, especially in winter. Human body reacts to the lack of moisture with dryness of skin and tissue lining nasal passages, respiratory problems and eye irritation. The arid air contributes to dust diffusion which contains microorganisms and house dust mites. Dust mites are notorious for aggravating allergies in some individuals. The dry air is especially bad for children, whose dust allergy can proceed into bronchitis and asthma. 
High humidity in dwellings leads to formation of fungus on walls, ceiling, corners. The air saturated with mold and its spores is also not the best companion for healthy people to live with. 

How to provide humidity control at homes? 
For the proper humidity control it’s necessary to know a humidity level of your building specifically. The most reliable humidity controller is an accurate humidity indicator. However a humidity level indoor strongly depends on a level of moisture concentration not only inside a building, but also outdoor. In winter the difference between levels of humidity indoor and outdoor is considerable due to the heating systems. Indoor the percentage of moisture in the air is decreased to 15-20%. While the standard humidity rate is 30-60%, and the medium level of comfort has 45% humidity rate. Moreover, these rates are not the same for everybody: they depend on climate, season and dwelling territory. For example, the most comfortable humidity level for Central Europe varies from 40% to 65%. During the winter, the medium level is 50%, and if you live in the tropics, this value is higher. 
To calculate a humidity level which is comfortable and carrying no harm neither people, nor house interior at this very moment, accurate and actual weather data is necessary. 
OpenWeatherMap provides such data for companies throughout the world. This data includes the current and historical weather data and forecasts. And we are very happy to make the lives of people more comfortable and perhaps even save their health.

Pilots are eager to fly. How weather data help to find an airway

Let's consider one of the new interesting cases where weather data by OpenWeatherMap is used. 

Usually it's not a quick and easy deal for pilots to find an air corridor with appropriate weather for flying. Sometimes a search for a starting point of a flight and for its destination point takes up to 1-2 hours. ParaglidingStart.info is an application which uses real-time weather data by OpenWeatherMap alongside with information from many other sources. The application shows the current weather for possible starting points of a flight. There also can be found forecasts and other information like the description of the areas or the airspaces. One can implement further features for the pilots in the future.

Pilots are eager to fly, not to spend time looking for airspaces appropriate for flying. And OpenWeatherMap team is happy that our data help them to do so.

Intellectual management of buildings. Weather API

Intellectual management of buildings simultaneously solves 2 crucial tasks: it lets decrease  electric power cost and reduce CO2 emission and it all together has a positive effect on ecology.  
For the present moment there exist ready solutions which allow reasonable management of all the equipment: lighting, air conditioning, ventilation, heating, cooling, secure systems, etc.
Effective tools of monitoring observe functioning of a building in real-time mode: the tools calculate energy consumption, analyze current technical issues, trace surplus of CO2 and its emission.
The analysis of data received with the monitoring tools also implements management of processes taking place in buildings remotely. For getting actual information, one needs only to launch a browser.     

And here an easy access to a huge storage of data arrays is really necessary: data of different kinds comes constantly and is being processed in real-time mode. 
Our OpenWeatherMap team is happy to know that our development of weather APIs which are used as a part of global solutions in such projects throughout the world contributes to increasing of energy effectiveness and thus helps to improve ecological situation.   

UV radiation: Its influence on ecosystems. The tools for secure monitoring — API for UV-index

In recent years, the question of changes happening to a phenomenon of ultraviolet radiation at the earth’s surface attracts increasing attention. The influence of ultraviolet radiation on the life on the Earth is immense. It is enough saying that ultraviolet radiation is one of the most important factors for evolutionary progress of nearly all living creatures. Various ecosystems in their development process have adapted to a level of UV radiation to some extent anyway. Thus it is crucially important for successful functioning of these systems that the UV level stays within a specific range as its abrupt shift can lead to serious consequences, to negative ones and however sometimes to positive. These shifts take their toll on the all ecosystems such as vegetation, freshwater habitats and sees, and certainly they have a strong effect on human activity.

Plants do have the ability to recover, but when a received radiation dose exceeds their regeneration ability so then damage is inevitable. UV radiation damage becomes apparent in decreasing of crop yield and fertility, in lowering of quality of goods and in ecological aftermath such as the change of proportion of cultivated plants and weeds.

It’s also necessary to consider here that UV radiation reduces the wear resistance of materials employed for outdoor usage. Even a slight increase in the level of UV radiation drives to diminishing of a service life of external facilities and to rising of repair and replacement costs. Nowadays effective researches are conducted to register the influence of UV radiation on a human body, and that influence can be beneficial, and what’s more it’s essential for a regular vital activity, and it can be almost destroying for a lively creature.

Data on intensity of UV radiation is highly required recently. Particularly when speaking about substantial changes of climate which are happening now and which are obvious to any ordinary person without any sensitive measuring instruments.

That’s why there are currently in need the tools for secure monitoring and forecasting of these changes, for development of successful management of possible consequences and for reliable assessment of current and future context.

Fortunately, this tool really exists and has been in operation for some time already. Over the past few years, OpenWeatherMap company has provided a significant data volume on UV-index. We deliver UVI current data as well as daily forecasts for a period of 8 days for any locations. Also we have started accumulation of historical data actively.

Then recently we have greatly improved the quality of provided data, that’s our API for UV-index. For example, now there is a new feature to request data on any geographic coordinates without limits on accuracy.

Accuracy of UVI modeled data has been increased twice (the interpolation grid step decreased from 0.5 to 0.25 degrees).

Soon the support of search by city name, city id and zip-code will be available.

You can find the instructions here http://openweathermap.org/api/uvi

Model of climatic parameters calculation for single fields

There is a source at http://agromonitoring.com where we suggest several simple examples of what you can create in your application with the help of our weather data.
For each of polygons/fields ( how to draw a polygon with visual tools ) you can set graphical presentation of climatic parameters, for instance, as charts for 3-hour forecasts for 5 days ahead and daily forecasts for 14 days ahead.
At the moment there are only temperature data in the application, but our weather API provides any data on pressure, clouds, wind, temperature, max/min temperature etc.

3-hour forecast for 5 days ahead

Visual presentation of historical data for a single field.

In this example the historical data are limited by a week period, but using our historical data API you can get them for any period for the last 5 years (check http://openweathermap.org/price)

Accumulated parameters.

These graphs show a sum of accumulated precipitation and accumulated temperatures.
Accumulated temperature data is an index that denotes an amount of warm. This index is determined as a sum of average daily air and soil temperatures which exceeds a definite threshold of 0, 5, 10 degrees or a biological minimum of temperature level which is crucial for some specific plant.

Accumulated precipitation data is calculated as a sum of all parameters for a peculiar period.

Now this data is available only at agromonitoring.com and is calculated basing on our historical data.
Soon we plan to launch new APIs that will  provide already calculated values of accumulated indexes for a definite region.

The weather alerts on our meteorological data

The weather alerts are ones of the tools that we offer for agricultural monitoring of fields http://agromonitoring.com/. For your convenience we have designed an interface for our API where you can create triggers for a polygon of any shape. These triggers will work out in case of emergence of specified weather conditions (temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.) during a certain period of time.    

For example, there is a field where some plants are inclined to suffer from freezing, while other plants need measures to be taken in case of strong wind – and you can easily get this information with our tool. Just set specific trigger conditions and if they happen you will get a program warning.  

Four simple steps for working with Weather Triggers API:

1  Create an account in members area and receive a key to access API.
2  Name your field and draw a polygon with visual tools. 

 

3 Create the trigger with the necessary conditions for temperature, pressure, humidity, wind speed, wind direction and clouds.

Parameters description: 

The Start and the End fields define the time period.
These fields also contain nested structures describing the beginning and the end of a time interval which is used to check the conditions.
The beginning and the end of a time interval represent a set of instructions for dynamic timestamp estimation. Timestamp is calculated considering the current time at the moment when conditions are being checked.

Parameter	Description
amount	Number of milliseconds
expression	Specifies how to process value of the amount field

 
The field Expression has three admissible values:

• exact - the field amount will be interpreted as a timestamp indicating an exact date/time
• аfter - the field amount will be interpreted as a number of milliseconds, which needs to be added to the current timestamp at the moment of validation to receive a chosen date/time.
• before - the field amount will be interpreted as a number of milliseconds, which needs to be subtracted from the current timestamp at the moment of validation to receive a chosen date/time.

The field Сonditions contains an array of objects describing the parameters that are used to do the comparison.

Parameter	Description
name	The name of the parameter to be compared with
expression	The expression, which will be used to compare
amount	Numerical value to be compared with

In the field name the following values are allowed: temp, pressure, humidity, wind_speed, wind_direction, clouds. Value of the name field specifies the corresponding parameter in a response from the Weather API that will be compared with.

The field expression indicates how exactly to perform comparison. The following values are available:

$gt - more than a value specified in amount.

$lt - less than a value specified in amount.

$gte - greater than or equals to a value specified in amount.

$lte - less than or equals to a value specified in amount.

$eq - equals to a value specified in amount.

$ne - not equals to a value specified in amount.

4  Check our service and receive information about an occurrence or a forecast of the upcoming events, which you are interested in.

See further: 

API documentation for Weather Alerts http://openweathermap.org/triggers 

Weather Alerts structure -  http://openweathermap.org/triggers-struct

Open Dashboard for Agricultural Monitoring

Today we’d like to show you what you can do with our data. Open Dashboard for Agricultural Monitoring (http://agromonitoring.com/) is a presentation of possible use of weather and satellite data in your agriculture applications. This is a service where everyone can find weather data and satellite imagery of their fields easily through our APIs. All you need to do is just to register, to draw a polygon and you get all the necessary stuff in an instant.        

Here you can evaluate a condition of fields from satellite imagery and get clear information for analysis of the dynamic changes taking place on these fields. Also this service provides weather data for any specified area: forecasts, historical data and notifications about critical weather situations for a stated period.

Watch your fields with open weather data and satellite imagery.

Create your fields and use the full range of open services on weather and satellite imagery

Field shape:

• Draw a polygon with visual tools.

Weather:

• 3-hour forecast for 5 days ahead
• Daily forecast for 14 days ahead
• Historical weather for 1 week past
• Accumulated parameters (for accumulated temperature and precipitation the historical data should be customized)

Vegetation indexes:

• NDVI on Landsat 8 and Sentinel 2

Build alerts on weather parameters:

 -  Weather triggers that flash on in case of the selected weather conditions (temperature, humidity, pressure, etc.) happening in a specified period of time. For example, you are interested in the forthcoming frosts or the probability of a wind speed increase in a certain place.