Weather forecasts from weather.gov as JSON

by Derek Swingley

On every National Weather Service forecast page, there's an orange XML button. Don't know what I'm talking about? Here:

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The button is web 2.0 relic from when the conventional wisdom was that people used feed readers. Some of us still do...but that's a story for another time.

I've looked at that XML button more than once and thought: "it'd be really cool if there was a JSON equivalent". Well, there is! Clicking that button sends your browser to a URL like:

http://forecast.weather.gov/MapClick.php?lat=32.7153&lon=-117.1573&unit=0&lg=english&FcstType=dwml

Notice the FcstType=dwml part. I don't know why, but I figured that maybe, just maybe, dwml is the response type. I changed dwml to json and...voilà, JSON response! Check it out! It even has an Access-Control-Allow-Origin:* for CORS. Or, if you're an animal, you can use JSONP with a callback query string parameter. Every once in a while, you stumble on something that makes you smile. This was one of those times.

Have I mentioned I like weather data?