AviationWeather API

Overview

Measurement Record

What actually happened when we called this API from our own infrastructure. Every value below was recorded by the request, not copied from the provider's documentation.

Request

GET https://aviationweather.gov/api/data/metar?ids=KJFK&format=json

Result

HTTP 200 · application/json · 507 bytes

Response time

30 ms (median of 3) · fastest 24 ms

Transport

TLSv1.3 · TLS_AES_256_GCM_SHA384 · certificate issued by DigiCert Inc

Browser CORS

No Access-Control-Allow-Origin header — call it from a server, not the browser

Recorded

2026-08-10

Fields Returned

Top-level fields present in the response we captured, with the type and value we actually received.

Captured Response

Captured from a real request to https://aviationweather.gov/api/data/metar?ids=KJFK&format=json on 2026-08-10. Long arrays and nested objects are truncated to keep the shape readable.

[
  {
    "icaoId": "KJFK",
    "receiptTime": "2026-08-10T19:55:06.004Z",
    "obsTime": 1786391460,
    "reportTime": "2026-08-10T20:00:00.000Z",
    "temp": 29.4,
    "dewp": 21.7,
    "wdir": 180,
    "wspd": 8,
    "visib": "10+",
    "altim": 1013.6,
    "slp": 1013.5,
    "qcField": 8,
    "metarType": "METAR",
    "rawOb": "METAR KJFK 101951Z 18008KT 10SM FEW050 BKN250 29/22 A2993 RMK SLP135 T02940217 $",
    "…": "(7 more fields)"
  }
]

Implementation Example

Calls a real endpoint of this API. Replace any placeholder credentials with your own key.

const url = "https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver";
const response = await fetch(url);
if (!response.ok) throw new Error(`Request failed: ${response.status}`);
const data = await response.json();
console.log(data);

import requests

url = "https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver"
headers = {}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, timeout=30)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
print(data)

curl "https://aviationweather.gov/api/data/metar?ids=KJFK&format=json"

What Can You Build?

// Fetch current weather for a city
const city = 'London';
const response = await fetch(`https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver`);
const data = await response.json();
const temp = data.main?.temp || data.temperature || data.temp;
const desc = data.weather?.[0]?.description || data.description || data.condition;
console.log(`Weather in ${city}: ${desc}, ${temp}°`);

// Display 5-day weather forecast
const response = await fetch(`https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver`);
const data = await response.json();
const forecast = data.list || data.forecast || data.daily || [];
forecast.slice(0, 5).forEach(day => {
  const date = day.dt_txt || day.date || new Date(day.dt * 1000).toLocaleDateString();
  const temp = day.main?.temp || day.temp?.day || day.temperature;
  console.log(`${date}: ${temp}° - ${day.weather?.[0]?.main || day.condition || ''}`);
});

// Check for severe weather alerts
const response = await fetch(`https://www.aviationweather.gov/dataserver`);
const data = await response.json();
const alerts = data.alerts || data.warnings || [];
if (alerts.length > 0) {
  alerts.forEach(alert => {
    console.log(`⚠️ ${alert.event || alert.type}: ${alert.description || alert.message}`);
  });
} else {
  console.log('✅ No weather alerts in your area');
}

Note: These code examples are AI-generated and unverified. Always refer to the official API documentation for accurate usage.

How This API Fails

We deliberately sent this API a broken request and recorded exactly what came back on 2026-08-10. Knowing the shape of an error before you hit it makes error handling much easier to write.

{
  "status": "error",
  "error": "Not found"
}

{
  "status": "error",
  "error": "Must specify station IDs or bounding box, zoom, and density"
}

Common Errors & Troubleshooting

Generated guidance based on this API's documentation, not observed by us. Treat it as a starting point and check against the provider's own error reference.