Pirate Weather API
Pirate Weather is a Dark Sky-compatible REST API providing current conditions, hourly and daily forecasts, and historical weather data using NOAA open data — a drop-in replacement for the deprecated Dark Sky API.
Score Breakdown
⚙ Agent Friendliness
🔒 Security
TLS enforced. API key in URL path is a security concern — keys can appear in server logs and browser history. No SOC2 or formal compliance. Open-source project with community maintenance. Suitable for non-sensitive weather data but avoid embedding key in logs.
⚡ Reliability
Best When
You need a free, Dark Sky-compatible weather API for agent workflows requiring forecasts or historical conditions, especially when migrating from the defunct Dark Sky API.
Avoid When
You need guaranteed enterprise SLAs, sub-minute weather updates, or comprehensive global coverage outside North America.
Use Cases
- • Agents retrieving current weather conditions and multi-day forecasts for location-based decision making (outdoor scheduling, logistics routing)
- • Historical weather data retrieval — agents fetching past conditions for a time range to analyze weather impact on past events or operations
- • Dark Sky migration — agents previously using Dark Sky API working without code changes by swapping the base URL and API key
- • Weather-triggered automation — agents polling forecasts to trigger alerts or workflow changes when thresholds (precipitation, temperature, wind) are exceeded
- • Bulk weather enrichment — agents augmenting datasets with weather conditions by fetching point forecasts for sets of coordinates and timestamps
Not For
- • High-frequency real-time alerting at scale — Pirate Weather has rate limits and is not designed for high-throughput production workloads; use Tomorrow.io or The Weather Company for enterprise scale
- • Aviation or maritime safety-critical weather — use certified weather data providers with official SLAs for safety-of-life applications
- • Global sub-hourly radar data — Pirate Weather is US-focused with limited non-US coverage outside NOAA data availability
Interface
Authentication
API key passed as a URL path component (matching Dark Sky's convention): /forecast/{api_key}/{lat},{lon}. Register at pirateweather.net for a free API key. No OAuth or header-based auth.
Pricing
One of the most generous free tiers for weather APIs. Community-supported open-source project backed by AWS Lambda and NOAA open data. Self-hosting is possible for unlimited use.
Agent Metadata
Known Gotchas
- ⚠ API key is embedded in the URL path (not a header or query param) — this is the Dark Sky convention that many HTTP clients do not handle idiomatically
- ⚠ Historical data (time machine) requests use the same endpoint with a Unix timestamp — not a separate endpoint; agents must format timestamps correctly
- ⚠ Coverage is primarily US/Canada; forecast quality degrades significantly outside North America where NOAA data is sparse
- ⚠ No webhook or push support — agents must poll on a schedule rather than receive event-driven weather notifications
- ⚠ As a community project, uptime is best-effort; agents should implement exponential backoff and graceful degradation for weather-optional workflows
Alternatives
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Scores are editorial opinions as of 2026-03-07.