noaa

Go package for parts of the weather.gov API. The data provided by weather.gov is in the public domain and covers the continental United States. The service is maintained by the National Weather Service under the umbrella of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).

Data on various weather.gov API endpoints is measured at different intervals. If a data point is measured hourly then you should take this into account when polling for updates.

API

noaa is a Go client for the weather.gov API and supports the following endpoints:

noaa.Points(lat string, lon string) (points *PointsResponse, err error) {

noaa.Office(id string) (office *OfficeResponse, err error) {

noaa.Stations(lat string, lon string) (stations *StationsResponse, err error) {

noaa.Forecast(lat string, lon string) (forecast *ForecastResponse, err error) {

noaa.GridpointForecast(lat string, lon string) (forecast *GridpointForecastResponse, err error) {

noaa.HourlyForecast(lat string, long string) (forecast *HourlyForecastResponse, err error) {

For convenience, the ForecastResponse includes a reference to the PointsResponse obtained. In 2017 api.weather.gov was updated with a new REST API that requires multiple calls to obtain the relevant information for the coordinates given by latitude and longitude. This PointsResponse is cached by the noaa client to reduce the number of round trips required for static data. (set of endpoints)

Setup

Assuming a working go 1.18+ toolchain is in place this module can be installed with:

go get -u github.com/icodealot/noaa

Examples

There are testable examples in example_test.go which can be run using:

go test -tags=examples -v

Note: if you get failures with HTTP error codes you might want to wait a bit and try again. This can sometimes happen and may be no fault of your own (welcome to the "cloud"). In a real world application you would implement some kind of mechanism to deal with transient HTTP response errors. (retry with delay and backoff strategy, circuit breakers, etc.)

A specific example can be run using:

> go test -tags=examples -run ^ExampleGetChicagoForecast$ -v
=== RUN   ExampleGetChicagoForecast
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Today                ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 76F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Tonight              ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 56F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Monday               ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 73F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Monday Night         ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 58F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Tuesday              ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 76F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Tuesday Night        ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 57F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Wednesday            ---> Windspeed: 5 to 20 mph     Temperature: 65F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Wednesday Night      ---> Windspeed: 15 mph          Temperature: 51F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Thursday             ---> Windspeed: 15 mph          Temperature: 62F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Thursday Night       ---> Windspeed: 10 to 15 mph    Temperature: 51F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Friday               ---> Windspeed: 10 mph          Temperature: 67F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Friday Night         ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 53F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Saturday             ---> Windspeed: 5 to 10 mph     Temperature: 73F
2023/05/21 09:27:08 Saturday Night       ---> Windspeed: 10 mph          Temperature: 59F
--- PASS: ExampleGetChicagoForecast (4.14s)
PASS
ok      github.com/icodealot/noaa       4.177s

Here is an example of using the github.com/icodealot/noaa module to get forecasted temperatures by day.

package main

import (
	"fmt"
	
	"github.com/icodealot/noaa"
)

func main() {
	forecast, err := noaa.Forecast("41.837", "-87.685") // Chicago, IL
	if err != nil {
		fmt.Printf("Error getting the forecast: %v", err)
		return
	}
	for _, period := range forecast.Periods {
		fmt.Printf("%-20s ---> %.0f%s\n", period.Name, period.Temperature, period.TemperatureUnit)
	}
}

Which will output something like the following:

This Afternoon       ---> 59F
Tonight              ---> 55F
Tuesday              ---> 67F
Tuesday Night        ---> 47F
Wednesday            ---> 72F
Wednesday Night      ---> 50F
Thursday             ---> 72F
Thursday Night       ---> 51F
Friday               ---> 62F
Friday Night         ---> 36F
Saturday             ---> 52F
Saturday Night       ---> 36F
Sunday               ---> 45F
Sunday Night         ---> 28F

Check out the types in noaa.go for more details about fields returned by the weather API.