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Overview

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For all product information and purchases, please consult the meteoblue Weather API product page.
The following pages here contain all technical information about the meteoblue Weather APIs.

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For questions regarding the API v2 migration, please check our API v2 FAQ. This page contains all technical information about the new meteoblue API.

We aim to provide a seamless migration process to the new API version. The current API will be replaced with the new API on 2024-03-04 at 10:00 CET.

meteoblue offers APIs for on-demand access to weather data via simple HTTP APIs. Customers can request weather data in multiple formats or ready-to-use visualizations. The API serves requests almost instantaneously and can be integrated into automated systems, websites or applications.

Weather data can be retrieved by coordinates with latitude and longitude for every place world wide. By using now-casting based on measurement stations, radar and satellite telemetry the forecast is always up to date. meteoblue's unique approach to combine multiple weather models with machine learning algorithms produces the best possible weather forecast.

The following API URL retrieves the current weather forecast in hourly and daily resolution for Basel, Switzerland: http://my.meteoblue.com/packages/basic-1h_basic-day?lat=47.558&lon=7.573&apikey=DEMOKEY

meteoblue offers different types of Weather API products:

ProductProduct DescriptionTechnical DocumentationProduct Page
Free Weather APIInstant access to meteoblue high-accuracy weather forecast dataFree Weather APIFree Weather API
Package APIData packages as CSV or JSON for forecast and historical weather dataPackage APIPackage API
Image APICharts as PNG images like meteograms, pictoprints or cross sectionsImage APIImage API
Maps APIWeather maps, satellite and radar imagesMaps APIMaps API
Dataset APIAccess to whole meteoblue weather data archiveDataset APIDataset API
Further APIsLocation Search API, Account API & PNG Maps APIFurther APIs

API Access

To access the meteoblue Weather APIs you need to get an API key. Please contact support@meteoblue.com to apply for an free API key trial. We offer demand-based or flat-rate pricing.

The API key must be appended to all API calls. The example API URL above uses &apikey=DEMOKEY. An API key should be kept private to prevent misuse. The meteoblue API also offers signature mechanisms to protect the API key in dynamic web applications or mobile apps.

An API key is typically limited to the number of calls per day for individual data package, image or weather map. Without further agreement, we impose a rate limit of 500 calls per minute.

Signing API Calls

API calls are only authorized by API keys. To prevent unauthorized access, we offer a signature mechanism with a shared secret. On request we will associate a shared secret with your API key and enforce the signature security policy.

To sign an API call you have to add a Unix timestamp to your URL and calculate an SHA256 hash of the query string and the assigned shared secret. API queries can be signed with HMAC SHA-256. Below you will find examples of how to achieve this in various languages.

$sharedSecret = "MySharedSecret";
$query = "/packages/basic-1h?lat=47.1&lon=8.6&apikey=DEMOKEY&expire=1924948800";

$sig = hash_hmac("sha256", $query, $sharedSecret);
$signedUrl = "https://my.meteoblue.com" . $query . "&sig=" . $sig;
// Result: https://my.meteoblue.com/packages/basic-1h?lat=47.1&lon=8.6&apikey=DEMOKEY&expire=1924948800&sig=a1fe106e1a0d31b122305f569532d2f646ad722d7a90bed69971bb8ce4466856

A maximum expiration time (&expire=1924948800, standing for 2030-12-31 12:00pm) can be specified to limit the validity of a call to a fixed unix timestamp. If it is not specified, the API query can be repeated indefinitely, but any modification to the URL will break the signature.

If UTF-8 characters are present in URL parameter, it is necessary to encode them before calculating the SHA256 HMAC signature. In PHP this can be done using the function urlencode().

$query = "/packages/basic-1h?lat=52.41&lon=16.93&city=" . urlencode("Poznań");
// Result /packages/basic-1h?lat=52.41&lon=16.93&city=Pozna%C5%84

This feature is intended to integrate meteoblue APIs directly into web-interfaces. We recommend a 10 minutes expire time. For more dynamic applications like mobile apps we recommend, that users are authorized on your systems and then signed URLs to the meteoblue APIs are returned.