The Visual Crossing Weather Query Builder is a no-code web interface designed for business analysts, researchers, and data teams to quickly explore, customize, and download weather data without writing code. Whether you need historical weather observations, short- and long-range forecasts, or severe weather alerts, the Query Builder allows you to preview datasets interactively in your browser and export them directly to CSV, Excel, or JSON.
The data is accessible in a variety of ways – directly in the browser, as a data download, direct to Excel or as a Restful API link for code/scripts. We will show you how to build the query in your browser and how you can access this data in the various ways.
You can visit our companion tutorial guide here: Tutorial: How to Build a Weather Dataset for Download, Bulk Import or Scheduling
This article steps you through the process of obtaining weather data though the Weather Data Services page also known as the Query Builder. (seen below)
Step 1: Creating an account
- Go to the Visual Crossing home page.
- Click Sign Up to create a free account, or Sign In if you already have credentials.
- Once logged in, visit the Query Builder page.
As we have never created an account before, press ‘Sign up’ to create a new account and start a free seven day trial.
The Sign Up process will walk you through the steps to enter an email, validate the email and finally create a password.
For more information on creating an account, see How to sign up for a Weather Data & Weather API Account
Retrieving our first weather data
Once you have created an account, return to the opening log in page and sign in with your new credentials.
The first screen you will encounter will ask you to provide the initial location you wish to query on. You can add more later, but to get an initial, default query for you the system needs a valid location.
Simply enter a valid location via one of the following forms:
- City & State / Country: e.g.,
Chicago, ILorLondon, UK - Full Address: e.g.,
11654 Plaza America Drive, Reston, VA - Postal / ZIP Code: e.g.,
20190 - Latitude & Longitude: Decimal Degree coordinates (DD), e.g.,
38.9697,-77.385 - Weather Station ID: Using the format
stn:<STATIONIDHERE>(e.g.,stn:KIAD)
We will start by entering “Chicago, IL” and clicking on the search icon. Later you will want to take advantage of the accuracy that Visual Crossing provides and give detailed addresses or even better… lat/long values.
Here we can see that the Query Builder has already created a basic query for us complete with a preview of the forecast results.
The first initial result is for Chicago, IL and it runs our “Next 15 Days” daily forecast and shows it to us a grid. If we are looking for this forecast in this format, we are done and can go right to downloading the data or copying the query URL.
However, in this tutorial we will show you a full set of features that you can utilize with the Query Builder, lets first look at the anatomy of the main Query Builder page:
Let’s briefly cover the main sections highlighted in our screen capture above:
Locations – In this section we can change our location or add multiple locations to our query. We can choose as many locations as is reasonable in the web interface. If you are creating an API query it is always best to call the API one location at a time and loop through your list of locations. Because you will be scripting/coding this, it is best for performance. However Visual Crossing does offer a Multi-Location version of the Timeline API that allows for a large, fixed number of locations (check your subscription) into a single URL call for convenience. (timelinemulti endpoint) The Query Builder when downloading datasets to your browser also allows you to import thousands of locations and will build large datasets for you. It does the task of looping through the list that you import.
Time Period – this section allows us to choose the time period for which we want to retrieve weather data for. Query Builder is built upon the Visual Crossing Timeline Weather API and as such, we only need to select a preset time window or provide start and end dates. We don’t need to tell the system that we want Forecast or History as your dates can be in both data sets. Here is the default list of options:
- Forecast Options: Quick presets for short- and medium-range forecasts (e.g., Next 15 Days).
- Custom Date Ranges: Select any past or future start and end dates. Support back as far as 1970 in most locations.
- Dynamic Date Macros: Built-in macros (such as
today,yesterday,last7days,last30days,monthtodate,yeartodate) ideal for recurring/scheduled reports.
Elements– Choose specific weather metrics to include in your dataset—such as temperature, precipitation, humidity, wind speed, solar radiation, degree days, or reporting station metadata. Some of the data is determined by your subscription and the editor will make that clear. Here you can make your datasets as small or large as you need based upon your requirements.
Units of Measure – Select your preferred unit system: US / Imperial (°F, mph, in), Metric (°C, km/h, mm), or UK / Scientific standards.
Query Options – There are several types of query options and some have a great multitude of sub-options. Here you can choose the type of data you want such as from Station Data or Radar. Historical Forecast, Degree Days both which require formula input are also here and require additional subscription privileges.
Viewer Mode – When viewing data results in Query Builder you can choose to see the standard grid or dashboards which allow users to customize the data view as a collection of grids and graphs to better display the data for export. By default, all data will be in grid mode as the first job of Query Builder is to show you the data that you will download or the results you will get from an API Query.
Data Result Sections – As described above, the grid view will offer to show you one of the available dataset sections in the previewer but also can be selected for output in your API Query Stream or download file.
Customize the grain of data returned in your download:
- Daily Summary: Aggregated daily maximums, minimums, and averages.
- Hourly Data: Detailed hour-by-hour weather trends and observations.
- Sub-Hourly / Minutely: High-resolution minute-level observations (where available).
- Current Conditions: Instant snapshot of current weather at the target location.
- Alerts & Severe Weather: Government-issued weather warnings and historical weather event logs.
In JSON result format you can combine these sections into a single output while in CSV you must choose during the download process which one you prefer as CSV is a single flat dataset. It is easier to read and parse but is limited to a single section of data.
Build API Query Button – In this section you can see the primary job of Query Builder… It is helping you to graphically construct a complex API query to retrieve via code/script/excel web query the data that you just constructed. You can choose the output streaming format (CSV, JSON, Excel, FlatJSON) as well as the sections of data you wish to retrieve.
When you are done building the query and choosing your API options you can simply choose “Copy” and the full RESTful Web URL query string is copied to your buffer for pasting. One quick test you can do is to paste this into the address bar of your favorite browser to see the results immediately. Remember that JSON allows for more complex, mixed datasets whereas CSV can have one section per query. FlatJSON is designed to be for ultra-fast, low latency, lightweight queries for apps and realtime solutions.
One final usage of this query string is to load it directly into Excel using the Data Menu’s “From Web…” function which uses the built-in Power Query function. You can read more about it here under the “Power Query” method: 4 Ways to Stream Weather Data into Excel
Download Data Button – The download button requests that a file be created for the chosen result data and be downloaded via the browser. Typically after clicking download, the user will be asked to confirm some selections about the file(s) to be downloaded and submit the final, billable query. A final download button will be offered to retrieve the data file through the browser.
Please note the built-in Query Cost Indicator calculates the estimated record/row usage for your request before you execute it, ensuring full transparency against your monthly account plan limits. After hitting “Continue” the user will be asked to name the dataset so that it can name the file and save the download into MyDatasets for later retrieval and editing. The final downloaded file will be sent to your browser’s “downloads” section.
Schedule Button – If you build a query (such as one with a dynamic date) you can choose to run it every single day on a schedule. This result will be found in MyDatasets and offers a web permalink to access the latest dataset where you will always have the latest run of the data. More information on using the schedule function can be fount here: How to Schedule Weather Data Queries
Statistics Button – This section allows a user to create a more aggregated set of data by month/year rather than a simple daily or hourly flat dataset of raw data. Details on this capability can be found here: Introduction to Weather Statistics and Analysis
Example History Query
For a step-by-step walk through of downloading of a CSV file for historical data: How can I download weather history data as a CSV file?
Next Steps & Automation
While the Query Builder is optimized for interactive data downloads, it also generates the underlying API Query URL for every search you build.
- Automate in Excel / Power BI: Click the API button in the top toolbar to copy the generated web link, then use Excel’s Data > From Web (Power Query) feature to set up automated, refreshing spreadsheets.
- Developer Hand-Off: If you eventually need to integrate weather data into automated scripts, codebases, or applications, refer to our Weather API.