I bet you’re wondering: Why would IBM, supplier of mainframe computers and software, acquire The Weather Company ? data !The Weather Company already moved its weather data to IBM’s cloud computing platform, then IBM can simply own it and do what it wants. Moreover Weather Company will be part of Watson Internet of things unit, so I said to myself, come on, let’s try the new IBM insights for weather API 🙂

According to me we could use weather data to send notifications to IoT devices, to social network accounts, to e-mails and to external systems, for example before a storm is moving in a certain direction but I think that the core businesses will involve the accurate weather forecasting and predictions based on Watson, and its analytical and cognitive capabilities. Perhaps Watson will be able to produce better ten-day forecasts and it is possible that there will be unimaginable scenarios at this time.

Which is the best way to test the new IBM insights for weather API ?

Of course Node-RED ! the tool for wiring together hardware devices, APIs and online services, where you customize and manipulate functional “flows” and any application consists of nodes which are linked together to form the logical flow. I created a new service to use IBM Insights for Weather to integrate historical and real-time weather data from The Weather Company into my application.

There are different rest-APIs regarding the current observation, the forecast hourly and and the forecast daily. I tested the current condition observation API by this flow :

the API is invoked any minute with the Rome’s coordinate, the current condition is displayed on debug window and send to freeboard web dashboard installed on my node-RED application.

Here my simple web dashboard :

I have many ideas based on IBM insights for weather API for next post.

Any comments and suggestions are welcomed.