Will it Rain Today? Forecast Weather using Python

Hello reader!

Weather is the mix of events happening each day in our atmosphere and is different in different parts of the world and changes over minutes, hours, days, and weeks. Rain and dull clouds, windy blue skies, cold snow, and sticky heat are very different conditions, yet they are all-weather. According to the Wikipedia:

Weather is the state of the atmosphere.

In this blog post, we will learn how to forecast weather details. We will see the implementation in Python with hardly a few lines of code.

1. What is wttr?
2. What is the requests Module?
3. How to forecast the weather using Python?

Let's get started!

What is wttr?

wttr — the right way to check the weather!

wttr.in is a console-oriented weather forecast service that supports various information representation methods like terminal-oriented ANSI-sequences for console HTTP clients (curl, httpie, or wget), HTML for web browsers, or PNG for graphical viewers.

wttr.in uses wego for visualization and various data sources for weather forecast information.

If you wish to know more about it, you can refer to wttr's GitHub Repo.

Module Used: requests Module:

Requests is a simple, yet elegant HTTP library. It allows you to send HTTP/1.1 requests extremely easily. Requests officially support Python 2.7 & 3.5+.

If you wish to know more about it, you can refer to Requests Module Documentation.

Now that you are familiar with Requests Module basics and have acquired basic knowledge of wttr, we can move forward to the coding section.

Time to Code!

You can find all the code in my GitHub Repository. Drop a star if you find it useful.

In order to access the Python library, you need to install it into your Python environment.

pip install requests

Now, we need to import the package into our Python script. Use the following command to do so.

import requests

Now that we have imported the library using the command import requests, let's proceed.

Let's ask the user to input the city name for which he/she wishes to fetch the weather details.

city = input('input the city name')
print(city)

You can also hard-code the value if you will only check for yourself.

city = 'bhopal'

Now, let's display a simple message.

print('Displaying Weather report for: ' + city)

#output:
Displaying Weather report for: bhopal

Let's define the URL, we will make use of the format to pass city as a parameter here.

url = 'https://wttr.in/{}'.format(city)

It's time to make use of the requests module.

res = requests.get(url)

Our resultant data is stored in res. We use the text method to extract our desired weather details, and let's display the result.

print(res.text)

This is how the Weather Forecast will look like:

Isn't it beautiful? And with that, it's a wrap! I hope you found the article useful! Share in the comments below.

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You can refer to my YouTube video Tutorial to see a working tutorial for better understanding and a step-by-step guide.

See you again. Take care!

Resources:

• https://scied.ucar.edu/learning-zone/how-weather-works/weather
• en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weather
• github.com/chubin/wttr.in
• pypi.org/project/requests
• docs.python-requests.org/en/master

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Also published on https://ayushirawat.com/forecast-weather-using-python.