Announcing Minutely Precipitation Forecasts

How soon will it rain? How intense will it be? As of today, these questions can now be answered with the release of our new Minutely Precipitation support!

Last year, we introduced the conditions endpoint that provides current weather conditions for any global location. Since, we’ve continued to enhance this endpoint and expanded our global historical access through 2011. Now we are excited to announce the conditions endpoint can now support Minutely Precipitation forecasts.

What is a Minutely Precipitation Forecast?

Minutely Precipitation provides the forecast precipitation rate in 1-minute intervals for the next 60 minutes. AerisWeather generates these high-resolution forecasts by continuously running custom models based on recent radar, satellite, and several other datasets.

The minutely precipitation forecasts provide the following attributes:

• precipitation rate (mm/hr and in/hr)
• snowfall rate (cm/hr and in/hr)
• primary weather
• weather icon

The minutely precipitation forecasts are available within the United States, Puerto Rico, Canada, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Ireland, the UK, Germany, and other countries in western Europe.

How to Access Minutely Precipitation

The Minutely Precipitation data has been integrated into the conditions endpoint, providing up to 60 minutes of precipitation forecasts in 1-minute intervals. To query conditions for Minutely Precipitation, add filter=minutelyprecip to your query. For example:

For the Minutely Precipitation for Minneapolis, MN

The api will return a result similar to the following:

The attributes returned by the API include:

Attribute	Description
timestamp	The Unix timestamp in seconds of the forecast minute.
dateTimeISO	The ISO date/time of the forecast minute.
precipMM / precipIN	The forecast precipitation rate/intensity in mm/hour and inches/hour
snowCM / snowIN	The forecast snowfall rate in cm/hour and inches/hour
weatherPrimary	The forecast weather
weatherPrimaryCoded	The coded version of the forecast weather.
isDay	Boolean value if the forecast minute is during the daytime.

Review the documentation for a complete description of the attributes and the conditions endpoint.

Minutely Precipitation in 5-minute Intervals

The minutely Precipitation is in 1-minute intervals by default. You can also request the data in 5, 10, 15, or other minute-based interval. To obtain the data in other intervals, append #min  to the filter parameter, where # is the interval value in minutes. The value must be an integer and can only be between 0-60. The API will respond with the precipitation forecast in the specified interval for up to the next hour.

For example, to obtain the precipitation forecast for Miami, FL in 5-minute intervals:

Or the precipitation forecast in 10-minute intervals for Toronto, Canada:

Integrate Minutely Precipitation Today

Start offering enhanced, down-to-the-minute precipitation forecasts with the new Minutely Precipitation feature. The minutely precipitation forecasts are part of the conditions endpoint and available to AerisWeather API Premium users and users of our free developer trial. Check out the new minutely precipitation forecasts and tell us how you’re using it!

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