Azure Maps Weather Services is a part of the Microsoft Azure Maps Service and offers a bunch of RESTful APIs that allow developers to integrate highly dynamic historical, real-time, forecasted weather data and visualisations into their solutions.
Three new services have been introduced: historical weather, air quality, and tropical storms, InfoQ noted in an article.
In fact, Azure Maps Weather Services became available in April 2021 after its preview in October 2019. It provides data from AccuWeather. In addition, it has a few services like hourly forecasted weather and current conditions. With the three new features, developers and companies have more capabilities to build more detailed weather-based applications.
Historical Weather will provide historical weather containing actuals, normals, and climatology data by day for a specified date range of up to 31 days in a single API request. Depending on the location and service, historical data may be available for 5 to 40 years. The information will include temperatures, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and cooling/heating degree day information.
Developers can also get current and forecasted air pollutants and air quality concentrations with the Air Quality service. Pollution levels, air quality index values, the dominant pollutant, and a brief statement summarising the risk level and suggested precautions are also included.
Last, but definitely not the least, Tropical Storms service can provide a developer with information on government-issued tropical storms, forecasted tropical storms, individual government-issued tropical storm locations, and the ability to search government-issued tropical storms by year, basin ID, and government ID.
The program manager at Microsoft for the Maps & Geospatial Product Group, Clements Schotte, wrote in a Techcomminity blog post about a few examples for the Air Quality Service:
“If you are building an outdoor running/cycling app, you can warn your users if the air quality conditions are better in one hour or analyze the impact on your health by tracking what kind of air you breathe. Air Quality info can be used on everything from outdoor sensors, devices used by people while commuting, working, exercising, and other outside activities to indoor use with HVAC and air purifiers or general monitoring of an area.”
Details on the Azure Maps Weather Services are available on the landing page of Azure Maps and the FAQs.
