OpenWeather Ltd
OpenWeather Ltd is a British-based tech company that provides weather and satellite data worldwide. OpenWeather Ltd collects and processes raw data from a variety of sources, and gives its customers access to the data archive. Inspired by companies that make information free and available for everybody, the company was founded in 2014 by Olga Ukolova and Denis Ukolov.
The company has a holding structure that consists of a parent company, Openweather Ltd (headquartered in London), and its subsidiaries OpenWeatherMap Inc. (incorporated in the USA) and OpenWeatherMap SIA (incorporated in the EU, in Latvia).
OpenWeather® is a registered trademark of OpenWeather Ltd.
Company profile: OpenWeather Ltd
OpenWeather Ltd is self-funded, has been profitable from the start, and funnels efforts into researching and developing new products.
It provides several services:
- OpenWeatherMap
- Agricultural API
- Dashboard
- VANE platform
As of 2020, OpenWeather Ltd has more than 2 million customers and supports 2,000 new subscribers per day. This includes Fortune 500 companies and thousands of other businesses globally.
Products and projects
There are three groups of products and projects in OpenWeather Ltd:
- OpenWeatherMap (Weather API) includes the following product collections:
- Current and Forecast collection
- Historical Collection
- Weather Maps collection
- Others: Weather Triggers, UV Index, Air Pollution
- The Satellite Imagery service includes the following products:
- Machine learning service
By default, OpenWeather data is available via easy-to-use APIs. However, tools have been developed to make the process of getting data easier than via an API – for example, the Dashboard.
OpenWeatherMap service
The OpenWeatherMap service provides current, forecast and historical (starting from 1979) weather data for any location. More than 20 weather APIs have been developed for getting different types of weather data. They support multiple languages, units of measurement and data formats.
As well as receiving weather data, users can also connect their weather stations to provide such data to OpenWeatherMap. This is intended to help improve the quality of weather data for these locations, especially those that are far from major cities.
Additionally, the OpenWeatherMap service allows any users to get basic weather data on the company’s website.
Satellite Imagery service
Agricultural API
The Agricultural API is aimed primarily at specialists developing agricultural services, and addresses the specific requirements of this sector. It is also geared towards the insurance and banking sectors, and can be used as a farm rating tool.
As part of this product, the Satellite Imagery service provides an API for receiving weather data (current weather, forecasts and history), satellite data (current and historical), and weather and vegetation indices based on this.
As well as the base parameters, there are specialised agricultural indices such as soil temperature and moisture, accumulated temperature, accumulated precipitation and satellite data (satellite imagery, and the EVI and NDVI vegetation indices). All agricultural data can be requested for a polygon.
Dashboard
Dashboard is a visual service where the user can work with satellite imagery and weather data for their polygons.
It provides the following options for the customer’s polygons:
- New satellite imagery every 2 to 4 days
- NDVI and EVI vegetation indices and their statistics
- Hourly and daily weather forecast data
- Current and historical weather data
- Accumulated temperature and precipitation
- Historical NDVI chart
The Dashboard services are based on the OpenWeather Agriculture API to satellite imagery and weather data, which a user can integrate into their agricultural applications, and visualise in the same way or another way.
Developers of agricultural applications can use Dashboard to get real examples of what OpenWeather provides through the Agricultural API. They can use it to visually evaluate how the APIs work, the quantity and quality of data, the speed of processing of requests, and the availability of the services.
It also contains features that are intended to be of interest to farmers. Using the simple interface, they can obtain agricultural data for monitoring their fields and analysing their condition, without any programming, during all seasons and phases of work.
Machine learning product development
OpenWeather Ltd has experience in the sphere of machine learning, and is working on new products. Currently, there are two projects for this direction:
- An API for machine learning that works with the OpenWeather database to get the most detailed information possible for each pixel in the image, including when it was taken, cloudiness, weather, and what object it belongs to (field, river, forest etc.).
- An API for machine learning applications to get fast, easy access to the OpenWeather database, process millions of tiles, and fit machine learning models with weather, imagery, elevation model data etc.
References
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