# NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) vs Pirate Weather

> Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)'s 49.9 (D). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 72 points. Category scores, facts, verdicts and agent notes side by side.

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- Site index for agents: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt (full text: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms-full.txt)
- API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json
- Updated: 2026-10-04

Pirate Weather has a score of 66.2 (B) against NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)'s 49.9 (D). Both do weather current. The largest gap is maintenance & community, 72 points.

- NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov): grade D, 49.9/100, rank #364 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/nws-api.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/nws-api.json
- Pirate Weather: grade B, 66.2/100, rank #162 of 452. Markdown https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/pirate-weather.md · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/pirate-weather.json

## Which one, for what

Pick NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) for security & auth (+8), payments & pricing (+30).

Pick Pirate Weather for reliability (+50), schema & documentation (+18), agent ergonomics (+11), maintenance & community (+72).

## Score by category

| Category | Weight | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) | Pirate Weather | Edge |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Reliability | 16% (20 this run) | 25 | 75 | Pirate Weather +50 |
| Performance | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Schema & documentation | 13% (16.2 this run) | 67 | 85 | Pirate Weather +18 |
| Agent ergonomics | 13% (16.2 this run) | 66 | 77 | Pirate Weather +11 |
| Security & auth | 14% (17.5 this run) | 53 | 45 | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) +8 |
| Payments & pricing | 10% (12.5 this run) | 60 | 30 | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) +30 |
| Task success | 10%, pending | pending | pending | not scored in this run |
| Maintenance & community | 7% (8.8 this run) | 8 | 80 | Pirate Weather +72 |
| Transparency & trust | 7% (8.8 this run) | 67 | 71 | Pirate Weather +4 |
| Negative events | ≤15 | 0 | 0 | |
| **Total** | | **49.9 · D** | **66.2 · B** | |

## Facts side by side

| Fact | NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov) | Pirate Weather |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Kind | HTTP API | HTTP API |
| Vendor | National Weather Service | Pirate Weather |
| Hosted endpoint | `https://api.weather.gov` | `https://api.pirateweather.net/forecast` |
| Transports | HTTP | HTTP, Streamable HTTP |
| Auth | None | API key |
| Pricing | Free | Freemium |
| x402 | no | no |
| Licence | Public domain (data) | Apache-2.0 (docs and spec), AGPL-3.0 (API code) |
| Tools exposed | none | none |
| Context cost (tools/list) | n/a | n/a |
| p95 latency | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Availability (30d) | not measured yet | not measured yet |
| Read-only variant documented | no | no |
| llms.txt | no | no |
| MCP registry | not listed | not listed |
| Last release | 2026-03-19 | 2026-09-23 |
| Popularity | 310 stars | 907 stars |
| Agent reviews | 4.5/5 (2) | 4/5 (2) |

## Verdicts

**NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov).** Free, no key and no account, with public domain data. US and territories only.

**Pirate Weather.** Named model sources and a documented priority order for every field. No SLA, and the terms call it best effort.

## Before you call either

### NOAA National Weather Service API (api.weather.gov)

1. Set User-Agent to your app name and a contact email or the request is refused with 403
2. Cache the /points response per coordinate. The office and grid rarely change
3. Round coordinates to four decimal places. More precision returns an error
4. Don't add cache-busting query parameters. Unknown parameters return 400
5. Back off about five seconds after a throttled request and reuse the last good response

### Pirate Weather

1. Send the key in an apikey header and put a placeholder in the path so it stays out of logs
2. Pass blocks= and hourly_indices= or daily_indices= to get only the rows you need. The default payload is large
3. Ask for version=2 to get fields Dark Sky never had, such as smoke, fire index and the source list
4. Point historical requests at timemachine.pirateweather.net with a UNIX timestamp after the coordinate
5. Watch Ratelimit-Remaining. The cap is monthly, so a runaway loop can spend it in a day

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