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WebSocketWeather

Weather Underground PWS RapidFire Stream

Weather Underground PWS RapidFire Stream is a websocket from Weather Underground (The Weather Company, an IBM Business) providing weather data. Weather Underground's RapidFire protocol is the real-time push channel of its 250k+ Personal Weather Station (PWS) network: stations POST observations to rtupdate.wunderground.com as often as every 2.5 seconds. For a Polymarket bot, it is the fastest live source for ground-truth station temperature/precipitation near a market's reference site (e.g. Central Park for "NYC high temp"), and the PWS Observations read API lets a bot pull the latest reported conditions for any station ID by geocode/ZIP.

At a glance

ProviderWeather Underground (The Weather Company, an IBM Business)
TypeWebSocket
CategoryWeather
Real-timeYes — streaming
AuthAPI key
PricingFree: station upload + RapidFire push are free; PWS-contributor read API is free (1,500 calls/day); broader Weather Company / IBM weather APIs are paid (legacy public WU API retired Dec 31, 2018) — PWS upload + RapidFire push: Free (requires a registered station ID + upload key), PWS Contributor read API: Free for station owners, ~1,500 calls/day at 30 calls/min (current conditions, 5-day forecast, PWS history, lookup by geocode/ZIP), Legacy free public WU API: discontinued Dec 31, 2018, Commercial / high-volume access: paid via The Weather Company / IBM Environmental Intelligence (custom pricing)

What data it provides

  • Air temperature (tempf) and dewpoint (dewptf)
  • Relative humidity (%)
  • Precipitation: hourly rain rate (rainin) and daily rain (dailyrainin)
  • Wind direction, speed and gust (winddir/windspeedmph/windgustmph)
  • Barometric pressure (baromin) and UTC observation timestamp (dateutc)
  • Per-station ID and lat/lon for hyperlocal siting near a market reference station

Features

  • RapidFire updates as fast as every 2.5s via realtime=1&rtfreq=2.5 on rtupdate.wunderground.com (vs ~standard intervals on weatherstation.wunderground.com)
  • 250,000+ PWS worldwide for hyperlocal coverage near nearly any U.S. reference site
  • Read side (api.weather.com /v2/pws/observations/current) returns the last record within 60 min, else a 'Data Expired' message
  • English/metric/hybrid units plus optional decimal numericPrecision on the read API
  • PWS history endpoints for backtesting; data also retrievable as CSV downloads per station
  • Simple HTTP GET protocol (no SDK required); many open-source uploader libraries (weewx, pywws, Node.js wrappers)

Links

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Listed, not endorsed. Pricing and capabilities change without notice — check the provider's own documentation before you depend on anything here. Browse the full data resources directory or the strategy database.
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