What are best practices for calling the T.io API?

With the wealth of weather information provided by Tomorrow.io’s weather API it can sometimes be a challenge to know how to optimize your recurring API calls to maximize your capture of updated data but minimize the number of calls in total. 

When making this decision it is important to understand that Tomorrow.io offers a variety of rapidly updating weather observation and forecast solutions. Across geographies and parameters the update frequency of the underlying data varies significantly. 

The following guidance is provided as a suggestion to help most users optimize their experience. Keep in mind that there is no one right answer for all users:

• Non-precipitation Forecast Variables -  Generally speaking, if you are calling current conditions and forecast values, making the call once per hour is the most useful approach as it ensures that the current conditions and forecast data will be meaningfully updated in most cases. 

• Non Precipitation Current Conditions - If you are only calling current conditions, feel free to call as frequently as every 5 minutes to maximize the chance that you will catch new observational data from a given station. Keep in mind that most reliable observation sites typically update once per hour with more frequent updates possible when adverse weather is occurring. Note that Tomorrow’s Current Conditions solution uses a combination of weather inputs and is not solely dependent on those observations. 

• Precipitation Variables - For short term precipitation (< 6 hours) calling the API every 15 minutes is optimal as that ensures incorporation of updated real time and nowcast precipitation data for all regions. For calls beyond that short term period, once per hour is the maximum recommended frequency.