Question

I am trying to use the NOAA API for current weather conditions observations and don’t know if there is an enumerated list of all the possible weather conditions that they can generate.

As an example if I use Yahoo’s API (using a woeid near Apples Headquarters as an example) with the URl:

http://weather.yahooapis.com/forecastrss?w=12797509

It returns data with a condition tag containing:

<yweather:condition  text="Fair"  code="34"  temp="87"  date="Wed, 13 Oct 2010 1:56 pm PDT" />

From this I can also programmatically map the code of 34 to “Fair” using the API documentation at Yahoo! Weather RSS Feed#codes

But in comparison if I use the NOAA feed and apply the closest weather station of KNUQ (as a guess) using:

http://www.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/KNUQ.xml

I get back data with a tag that simply contains

<weather>Fair</weather>

So what I am looking for is to see if there is an enumeration of the contents of the <weather> tag. I haven’t been able to find it on the NOAA site, but I wouldn’t be surprised if I am looking in the wrong location.

Answer 1

The list of possible weather “phrases” and their associated icons is located here.

Weather Conditions

Possible weather conditions listed in
the “weather” section of the NWS XML
Feeds of Current Weather Conditions.
Conditions are listed with suggested
icons.