A web service that periodically retrieves, processes, persists and stores weather forecast data from api.met.no for selected locations associated with a single “data location” (due to the accuracy of latitude and longitude coordinates), and provides historical access and weather data statistics by exposing a REST API.

I created Bellweather to enable an upcoming weather forecast feature of RENT21’s property-management SaaS. As the number of real estate properties on the web app increases, so does the probability that more than one property falls within the same latitude and longitude coordinates, when these are rounded to 4 or fewer decimal digits.

This, therefore, makes it possible to map multiple locations onto a single “data location”, for which data is periodically fetched from the MET Weather API that is provided by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute free of charge.

Effectively, Bellweather serves as a multi-location-based caching layer that reduces the load on MET’s API, while also persisting historical data on a location’s weather information.