Azure Maps Weather Services is a part of the Microsoft Azure Maps Service. It offers a set of RESTful APIs, allowing developers to integrate highly dynamic historical, real-time, forecasted weather data and visualizations into their solutions. Recently, they announced three new services with historical weather, air quality, and tropical storms.
Azure Maps Weather Services became generally available in April 2021 after its preview in October 2019. It sources the data from the worldwide leading weather services provider, AccuWeather. In addition, it has a few services like hourly forecasted weather and current conditions. With the three new services, developers and companies have more capabilities to build richer weather-based applications.
With Historical Weather, a developer can get historical weather containing actuals, normals, and climatology data by day for a specified date range of up to 31 days in a single API request. Depending on the location and service, historical data may be available for 5 to 40 years, including temperatures, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, and cooling/heating degree day information.
Next, a developer can get current and forecasted air pollutants and air quality concentrations with the Air Quality service. Forecasted data is available by the hour (for the next 1, 12, 24, 48, 72, and 96 hours) and by day (upcoming 1 to 7 days). Pollution levels, air quality index values, the dominant pollutant, and a brief statement summarizing the risk level and suggested precautions are all included in the information.
Clements Schotte, program manager at Microsoft for the Maps & Geospatial Product Group, wrote in a Techcomminity blog post about a few examples for the Air Quality Service:
If you are building an outdoor running/cycling app, you can warn your users if the air quality conditions are better in one hour or analyze the impact on your health by tracking what kind of air you breathe. Air Quality info can be used on everything from outdoor sensors, devices used by people while commuting, working, exercising, and other outside activities to indoor use with HVAC and air purifiers or general monitoring of an area.
And finally, the Tropical Storms service can provide a developer with information on government-issued active tropical storms, forecasted tropical storms, individual government-issued tropical storm locations, and the ability to search government-issued tropical storms by year, basin ID, and government ID.
Lastly, more details on Azure Maps Weather Services are available on the landing page of Azure Maps and the FAQs. Additionally, pricing details can be found on the pricing page.