National Weather Service scraper and API skills
Site: weather.gov
The National Weather Service does publish a free public API at api.weather.gov, with no key required — this is one of the good ones. These skills wrap it correctly, handling the two rules that break most first attempts: a mandatory User-Agent and four-decimal coordinate precision.
Working with National Weather Service
- A User-Agent header is mandatory; without one the API returns 403.
- /points rejects coordinates with more than four decimal places, answering 301 to a rounded path rather than an error.
- Both skills return an explicit outcome discriminator, including distinct shapes for stale and missing station data.
2 National Weather Service skills
- weather.govv1
NWS Weather Forecast for a US Point
Given a US location (lat/lon, ZIP, or city+state), return the National Weather Service forecast: current observation, hourly forecast, 7-day multi-day periods, active alerts/watches/warnings, the forecast office, and the underlying grid cell. Read-only via the public api.weather.gov JSON surface (no auth).
- weather.govv1
Is It Cloudy? — Sky Conditions, Visibility & Blue-Sky Check
Return current sky conditions for a US location: cloud-cover layers (METAR CLR/FEW/SCT/BKN/OVC/VV with base heights), surface visibility in meters and miles, and a derived 'can you see blue sky?' boolean — pulled from the free NWS api.weather.gov JSON API.
National Weather Service scraping questions
- Does National Weather Service have an API?
- Yes — api.weather.gov is free, public and needs no key. It does require a descriptive User-Agent header and coordinates rounded to four decimals.
- Is scraping National Weather Service legal?
- Reading data that National Weather Service publishes publicly is generally treated as lawful in the US — hiQ v. LinkedIn found that scraping a public site does not by itself violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. That is not the whole question: National Weather Service's terms of service, its robots.txt, the rate at which you request pages, and any personal or copyrighted data you collect all carry their own obligations, and the rules differ outside the US. These skills read public pages at human-scale rates and never bypass a login. Treat this as background, not legal advice.
- What data can I extract from National Weather Service?
- Forecast periods with temperature and wind, sky cover and visibility, the resolved observation station, and the observation timestamp.