How to use ClimateLog Open Scientific API to revamp your business

By Nicolus Rotich

While traditional application programming interfaces (API) have been around for sometime now, a new dawn was realized upon conceptualization of AI and Internet of Things (IoT) powered systems. ClimateLog scientific API belongs to the latter group, in which millions of data-points have been used to train elegant models aiding us to arrive at incredibly accurate inferences concerning climate, climate change, and its influence on our day-to-day businesses.

Indeed according to Deloitte Global’s 2021 Climate Check report, over 80% of business executives are concerned over the warming planet. The report cites that more than 70% of all economic sectors are struggling with both direct and indirect impacts of climate change and extreme weather patterns.

The risks presented by climate change are difficult to overlook. Businesses are disrupted ranging from supply chains and labor challenges, to the costs of insurances due to uncertainties caused by wild fires, floods, heatwaves and hurricanes among other catastrophes. Here is the kicker. According to Forbes magazine², most companies are still in denial and therefore hesitant to implement significant operational changes to address the challenges.

Among the difficulties cited by the executives, is the lack of proper education and the need to promote science-backed climate research. This is critical in setting the proper course and priorities for collaboration between private businesses, governments and higher learning institutions in tackling the climate change stalemate.

Introducing ClimateLog API

ClimateLog scientific is an opensource API hosted at rapid API hub³. It provides certain metrics based on the GPS coordinates or near longitudes and latitudes to hundreds of cities around the world. Unlike your typical weather pattern API, ClimateLog uses long-term data to infer to three main end-points containing information that are crucial to many businesses. The end-points are as follows:

Cities list

As per the comments in the first few lines, this first end-point only lists for you all the cities in which data has been analyzed and therefore the technical information regarding climate can be requested. If your city is not available in the list, there is no cause for alarm as more data is being analyzed and released periodically. Above query returns a list of locations, namely city, and country, together with their near latitudes and longitudes as shown in the sample request below:

City specific data

The second and more important end-point provides more information based on the city chosen.

The get-request returns the following real-time response:

Explanation of the response data and their climate relevance

The end-point provides the Geo-data of the requested location, and goes ahead to present the usual weather information such as temperature, humidity, pressure, and wind speeds. Besides these, it also provides the fluid dynamic properties of the surrounding air conditions namely: the molecular speed, mean free path, dry and humid air densities, dynamic and kinematic viscosity.

Above information are used to infer to three more crucial pieces of information that describes the extent of climate influence of the set of coordinates in question:

Mean free path: This parameter measures the length a particle in air (molecule, photon, electron, etc) travels before undergoing successive impact or collision with other particles. The implication being, a shorter mean free path suggests unrest or turbulence in the described fluid — it could imply that the air is polluted with foreign particles, or possible intermittent ambient variations.

Wind shear rate: Wind shear is the change in speed or direction of wind over a relatively short distance or time period. Depending on whether its horizontal or vertical, this could imply the extent in which hurricanes can form or destruct. When combined with low atmospheric pressures, this could be a recipe for hurricanes exacerbation, especially when the storm is pushed through a narrow area. However, when pushed over a broader area, there is a greater chance that storm will dissipate and thereby hurricanes are torn apart before they develop. Wind shear also has a strong influence in the aviation industry as well the built environment. According to the NASA Langley Research Center, about 500 fatalities and 200 injuries resulted from wind-shear crashes involving 26 civil aircraft between 1964 and 1985.

Wild fires/heatwave potential: This is the overall computation of the effects of above metrics carried out by ClimateLog AI algorithm. Wild fires and heatwaves are the making of low atmospheric pressures, short mean free paths, and higher shear rates. In this perspective, it is returned as a binary 0 and 1 for low and high potential of occurrences respectively.

An example usage of the ClimateLog open API is to query locations (2) on the above map — salt lake city and San Francisco and compare with an outlier Kingston — Australia as follows:

It is evident from above synthesized information that the numerical data speak volumes as to the extent the micro-climates vary between the two continents. As a matter of fact, the algorithm further presents us with an extra end-point just for the estimation of the heatwave and/or wild fires potential purely from temperature, humidity, and dry air partial atmospheric pressure of a given Geo-location (GPS coordinates). The structured query looks something like this:

The resulting response is a plain text of the following form:

However, a separate query with higher temperature and lower atmospheric pressure coupled with a moderate humidity

we get the following response:

A summary of the business Implications

With information derived from ClimateLog scientific API, as trivial as they may seem, many business sectors can benefit from this. Insurance risk assessors, farmers, homeowners, real-estate developers, manufacturers, civil aviation administrators, public and private policy makers among other business owners stand to benefit by making use of the portal. In conclusion, here are some of the practical decisions one can make based on above case studies:

• Insurance brokers can fashion custom pricing models for different cities based on the API, e.g. for fire and emergency insurances.
• Heatwaves can cause serious implications on health for various individuals. Migraines, heat-strokes, heat prostration, fainting, heat rash are some of the illnesses related to frequent and severe heatwaves — choosing where to reside or conduct business can be as simple as knowing where to look for the right information.
• Civil aviation industry and private jet owners could benefit from such information portal by extracting and extrapolating on the given data.
• Academics may want to understand the fluid dynamics of a local environment climate patterns can get resources to guide their studies from ClimateLog scientific API.
• Real estate developers may utilized the API to better understand the terrain beforehand.
• ClimateLog can as well function as a conventional API for building minimal weather applications — this is instrumental for young enthusiastic IT engineers.
• Manufactures of sensitive pharmaceuticals, powders and granules can derive useful information based on their localities.