Travis Ennis

Collecting Weather Data

I've recently been interested in learning more about all of the health data that I collect about myself. Currently, I wear an Apple Watch 5 and let it collect all of the data it collects throughout the day: steps, heart rate, workouts, etc. I use the app FatSecret to track what I eat, which has built up almost three years of calorie and nutrient information. For sleep, I use AutoSleep to gather data on my sleep metrics. Needless to say I collect a lot more data than I even realized. I recent export from my Apple Health app was over 1GB of data unzipped.

Someday, I'll need to write more about what all I could do with that data and what I've learned from. Today, I want to talk about some specific data that I decided I wanted to collect: weather data. Collecting weather data in the service of understanding my health data comes about for two reasons: one, it should be relatively easy to collect and, two, I'm curious to see what correlations there are to temperature, air pressure, humidity, etc. on how I feel and, more specifically, how I sleep.

My first problem to solve is where do I get this data from.

API Web Service Example URL

Past Weather by Zip Code - Data Table | NOAA Climate.gov

Climate Data Online (CDO) - The National Climatic Data Center's (NCDC) Climate Data Online (CDO) provides free access to NCDC's archive of historical weather and climate data in addition to station history information. | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)

Two (and a half) ways to get weather data: Part 1- Web Scraping from Wunderground - C. R. Gette Two (and a half) ways to get weather data: Part 2- Using an API and NOAA - C. R. Gette

celikfatih/noaa-weather: You can access historical weather data with NOAA Weather API.

You've found yourself on the site of Travis Ennis, a software engineer who lives in Indiana. If you'd like, you can contact me.