Spot Assist mobile application requires weather data. There are many weather APIs, but they are targeted to a high-scale user, and quite expensive for a low-traffic consumer.
At the same time, NOAA is a government project that has enough weather data for the task and it is free. All you need to do is learn a format.
However, learning the format I realized why commercial weather APIs are expensive – it processes an enormous amount of data for the entire planet. Formats are complex and sometimes incomplete.
Spot Assist never had a goal to cover the entire planet. It only needed a small subset of geo points, where dropzones are, so it made sense to build a custom solution.
Spot Assist data API needed following REST endpoints:
- api/weather?lat=xxx&lon=yyy – provides weather for geo point. Authenticated.
- api/access-token – provides a token to access authenticated endpoints