Bloomberg weather data

Question

We have a Bloomberg (BBG) Data License Subscription and want to include weather data into our application. However, we just found out that while they have current weather data, no weather data history is available.

Now, I have a hard time believing that a data provider as big as BBG offers no weather data history and I also assume that standard support never fully understands the problem, otherwise they'd work in development and not support. Finally, I am for sure not the only guy needing weather data history.

For these reasons I ask if (and how) weather history (or weather forecast history) can be obtained using BBG data license?

PS: This is not strictly a dev topic but I assume that only people that already had this type of problem (i.e., developers) know the answer. Management/support/whoever only knows that their app "uses BBG data" but not the tickers, fields, ...

Answer 1

The short answer is yes, you can get historical temperature data from Bloomberg and there is a ticker for each series by year and weather station.

I tried to solve this once. I used the terminal screen to obtain a graph of YTD daily temperature history (low,high,average) for 10 calendar years for a zip code of interest, then exported it all to Excel. I think I was able to deduce the ticker from the column labels.

My application was for calculating degree-days and I wanted the spreadsheet to refresh the YTD data on opening. Also, Bloomberg's graph loaded the same date range (Jan 1-Today date) for current and past years and I wanted complete past years. So I altered the date ranges for each series in my spreadsheet (and lined up the month/day labels). The end goal was to show when certain degree-day targets had been reached in the past years, and progress so far this year.

So start out by exploring the relevant terminal functions, then export the data and see what the tickers are.

Alternately, search for examples in the Excel API, and search for examples in Bloomberg help. You can find a lot of hidden tickers and even beta functions by looking at their examples. The tickers at least have a good chance of working from the data license. (provided no provider or source fields are involved.)

Answer 2

We resorted to use wunderground (www.wunderground.com) data which offers weather data and the first 500 requests per day (a request is a combo of place and time) are free. It took some programming but in the end we have a reliable and fully automatic weather data provider that (IMO) cannot compete with BBG