Weather Data Extractor

The Weather Data Extractor is an enterprise-grade, high-performance web scraping and data integration solution for Weather.com. It is designed to extract real-time meteorology datasets, including comprehensive current conditions, high-resolution 24 to 48-hour hourly forecasts, 8 to 15-day daily forecasts, and EPA global air quality indices for any region, city, zip code, or specific geographic location worldwide.

To ensure uninterrupted data extraction and bypass standard anti-bot obstacles (such as Cloudflare challenges, browser fingerprinting, and rate-limiting), this Actor features an integrated, zero-configuration bypass framework. The Actor automatically employs intelligent request-level browser emulation and seamlessly escalates requests through a premium, rotating residential proxy network on failure. You do not need to configure any proxies, buy credentials, or manage custom browser headers—all bypass mechanics are handled dynamically under the hood to ensure industry-leading data retrieval success rates.

---

🌟 Key Features

• Dynamic Location Resolving & Geocoding: Input standard query names (such as Dhaka, Marion County, FL, 90210, or London, UK), and the Actor will automatically query Weather.com's public geocoding API to resolve the exact coordinates and unique placeId to target.
• Direct Code Scraping: Provide raw Weather.com location/station codes for direct, high-speed, and precise coordinate mapping.
• Direct URL Inputs: Input specific Weather.com pages directly to bypass search entirely and scrape exact targets immediately.
• Current Meteorology Metrics: Extract 17+ essential metrics including temperature, feels-like, UV index, relative humidity, pressure, visibility, dew point, wind speed/direction, and current conditions phrases.
• High-Resolution Hourly Forecasts: Retrieve hourly weather conditions, temperature, humidity, precipitation chance, precipitation type, wind cardinal direction, and UV index.
• Extended Daily Forecasts: Extract 8 to 15-day daily forecasts with Day-part granularity (separate daytime and nighttime metrics for weather phrases, precip probability, wind speeds, and humidity), plus moon phase and exact sunrise/sunset times.
• EPA Global Air Quality Index (AQI): Extract real-time air quality index values, primary pollutants, EPA categories, and custom health advisory messages.

---

🚀 Common Use Cases

1. Travel, Logistics & Supply Chain: Plan shipping routes and schedule travel by scraping high-resolution hourly and extended daily forecasts for key global transit hubs.
2. Agriculture & Farm Management: Optimize irrigation and crop spraying schedules by tracking precise relative humidity, daytime wind speeds, and real-time precipitation chances.
3. Retail & Demand Forecasting: Correlate local weather trends (such as heatwaves or incoming storms) with purchase behavior to forecast inventory requirements.
4. Energy & Resource Planning: Monitor solar intensity (via UV indices) and heating/cooling demand (via temperature and feels-like indexes) for smart grid optimization.
5. SEO & Content Automation: Power localized weather widgets, automated regional weather blogs, or localized marketing campaigns with structured, real-time datasets.

---

⚙️ Input Form Parameters

The Actor is configured with a fully customizable, user-friendly input interface on the Apify platform:

Field Name	Type	Required	Default	Description
locations	array	No	["Dhaka", "Marion County, FL"]	A list of city names, region names, county names, or postal zip codes to search and scrape.
locationCodes	array	No	[]	A list of raw Weather.com station or location codes for direct lookup.
urls	array	No	[]	A list of specific Weather.com URLs.
maxItems	integer	No	1000	The maximum number of location profiles to scrape in a single run.
requestTimeoutSecs	integer	No	30	The maximum timeout in seconds for fetching and processing each location.

Note: You must specify at least one location search query, location code, or URL to execute a scraping run.

---

📊 Data Dictionary (Output Fields)

When the Actor executes, it pushes flat or nested JSON weather profiles to your Apify default dataset. Below is a detailed description of the extracted keys:

Metadata & Location Info

• searchQuery: The original string or code that triggered the task.
• locationCode: The resolved unique location identifier (place ID) on Weather.com.
• url: The exact Weather.com target page URL scraped.
• locationName: The official display name of the location.
• latitude / longitude: Geographic coordinates.
• scrapedAt: ISO timestamp indicating when the profile was scraped.

Current Observations (currentConditions)

• temperature / feelsLike: Actual temperature and human-perceived temperature (Feels Like).
• temperatureMaxSinceMidnight / temperatureMinSinceMidnight: Temperature highs and lows recorded since 12:00 AM.
• humidity / relativeHumidity: Atmospheric moisture percentage.
• windSpeed / windGust: Current wind speed and gust velocities.
• windDirection / windDirectionCardinal: Wind direction expressed in degrees and cardinal headings (e.g., NNE).
• uvIndex / uvCategory: Ultraviolet solar radiation level and its safety classification (e.g., Extreme).
• visibility: Optical visibility distance.
• pressure / pressureTendency: Atmospheric pressure and tendency (e.g., Falling).
• dewPoint: The temperature at which water vapor condenses.
• weatherPhrase: Text description of current sky conditions (e.g., Haze, Partly Cloudy).

Air Quality (airQuality)

• aqiValue: Air Quality Index value.
• aqiCategory: EPA category classification (e.g., Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups).
• primaryPollutant: Major active pollutant (e.g., PM2.5).
• advisoryMessage: Comprehensive health and safety advisory message.

Hourly & Daily Lists

• hourlyForecast: Array of 24 to 48 sequential hourly entries containing weather phrases, precipitation probability (precipChance), precip type (rain or snow), humidity, and wind details.
• dailyForecast: Array of 8 to 15-day sequential daily forecast blocks containing daytime and nighttime weather phrases, temperatures, relative humidity, wind speeds, moon phases, and exact sunrise and sunset times.

---

📥 Sample JSON Payload

Below is an example of a complete weather dataset output item generated by this Actor:

{
  "searchQuery": "Dhaka",
  "locationCode": "f370fc9f1e5d07401a72fab32be4e1abe8f8f9df412cbaef3110e44cbf45cc56",
  "url": "https://weather.com/weather/today/l/f370fc9f1e5d07401a72fab32be4e1abe8f8f9df412cbaef3110e44cbf45cc56",
  "locationName": "Dhaka",
  "latitude": 23.764,
  "longitude": 90.389,
  "scrapedAt": "2026-06-09T06:04:34.264361Z",
  "currentConditions": {
    "temperature": 86,
    "feelsLike": 99,
    "temperatureMaxSinceMidnight": 88,
    "temperatureMinSinceMidnight": 82,
    "humidity": 76,
    "windSpeed": 7,
    "windGust": null,
    "windDirection": 30,
    "windDirectionCardinal": "NNE",
    "uvIndex": 11,
    "uvCategory": "Extreme",
    "visibility": 2.2,
    "pressure": 29.59,
    "pressureTendency": "Falling",
    "dewPoint": 78,
    "weatherPhrase": "Haze",
    "relativeHumidity": 76
  },
  "airQuality": {
    "aqiValue": 103,
    "aqiCategory": "Unhealthy for Sensitive Groups",
    "primaryPollutant": "PM2.5",
    "advisoryMessage": "Members of sensitive groups may experience health effects. The general public is not likely to be affected."
  },
  "hourlyForecast": [
    {
      "time": "2026-06-09T13:00:00+0600",
      "epochTime": 1780988400,
      "temperature": 87,
      "feelsLike": 100,
      "weatherPhrase": "Scattered Thunderstorms",
      "precipChance": 65,
      "precipType": "rain",
      "humidity": 75,
      "windSpeed": 6,
      "windDirectionCardinal": "SSE",
      "uvIndex": 7
    }
  ],
  "dailyForecast": [
    {
      "dayOfWeek": "Tuesday",
      "date": "2026-06-09T07:00:00+0600",
      "epochTime": 1780966800,
      "temperatureMax": 89,
      "temperatureMin": 80,
      "weatherPhraseDay": "Thunderstorms",
      "weatherPhraseNight": "Mostly Cloudy",
      "precipChanceDay": 100,
      "precipChanceNight": 24,
      "windSpeedDay": 11,
      "windSpeedNight": 9,
      "humidityDay": 74,
      "humidityNight": 86,
      "sunrise": "2026-06-09T05:10:51+0600",
      "sunset": "2026-06-09T18:44:31+0600",
      "moonPhase": "Waning Crescent"
    }
  ]
}

---

🔌 Integrations & Webhooks

Since all datasets are stored directly in your Apify Cloud account, you can easily sync and stream this data to your favorite platforms:

• Webhooks: Configure a webhook to automatically send POST payloads of scraped weather forecasts to your custom REST API or serverless endpoints whenever a run finishes.
• Zapier / Make: Trigger automated workflows that export scraped daily datasets directly to Google Sheets, Airtable, Notion, SQL databases, or email digests.
• Direct API Access: Query the dataset directly via REST endpoints using JSON, CSV, XML, or Excel formats.

---

🛡️ License, Reliability & Support

• This Actor is designed to retrieve publicly accessible state hydration payloads from Weather.com. Please keep workloads and request frequencies respectful of source guidelines.
• If you notice any data structure updates on Weather.com or need additional meteorological fields, please file a ticket under the Issues tab.