MET Norway Locationforecast

Implementation notes

When to use MET Norway Locationforecast

MET Norway (Locationforecast 2.0) is the cleanest no-key global weather API after Open-Meteo. It is produced by the Norwegian Meteorological Institute — publicly funded, GDPR-clean by default (EU data residency), and using ECMWF as its numerical backbone. Choose MET Norway when you need the strongest data provenance story (a government meteorological service is easier to defend than a commercial provider), when your users are in the Nordic countries and want the local authority, or when you want to avoid US-based providers for compliance reasons. The forecast quality is world-class for the first 48 hours and comparable to Open-Meteo globally.

Common pitfalls

• A valid `User-Agent` header is mandatory. Requests without it return a 403 Forbidden. The header should identify your application and include a contact URL or email — for example: `User-Agent: my-weather-app/1.0 (contact@example.com)`. Using a generic browser user agent is explicitly against the terms of service.
• The response includes an `Expires` header telling you exactly when the next forecast update will be available. Ignoring this header and polling more frequently than once per 30 minutes is flagged as abusive and may result in IP blocks.
• MET Norway's JSON structure nests forecasts inside `properties.timeseries[].data.instant.details` and `properties.timeseries[].data.next_1_hours.summary`. The nesting is deeper than most weather APIs — budget time for parsing.
• Global coverage degrades at very high latitudes. Forecast accuracy drops noticeably above 80°N, which is expected given the ECMWF grid resolution, but rarely documented.
• There is no explicit rate limit — instead the service relies on caching via the `Expires` and `Last-Modified` headers. Applications that ignore these and hammer the endpoint will be silently blocked (IP-banned) rather than throttled with 429s. Respect the caching headers or run your own proxy.

Quick start (bash)

curl -H "User-Agent: my-app/1.0 (contact@example.com)" "https://api.met.no/weatherapi/locationforecast/2.0/compact?lat=59.91&lon=10.75"

From our monitoring

In our hourly monitoring, MET Norway reliably responds in under 400ms. It has maintained 99%+ uptime over the periods we have tracked — consistent with it being government-funded infrastructure rather than a commercial product with cost pressure. We have never seen a MET Norway outage lasting more than 20 minutes across 9 months of monitoring. The `Expires`-header caching model works exactly as documented and is friendlier to clients than the throttle-and-429 model most APIs use.

Production integration patterns

Respect-the-Expires-header pattern

The correct integration pattern with MET Norway is HTTP caching, not scheduled polling. Store the response along with its `Expires` header value. Before making a new call, check the cached response's expiry — if it hasn't expired, reuse. If it has, make the call with an `If-Modified-Since` header echoing the previous `Last-Modified` value. MET Norway returns 304 Not Modified when nothing changed, saving them compute and you bandwidth. This is not just polite; it's the difference between a working integration and an IP ban.

GDPR-friendly weather feature

For products deployed in the EU that need weather integration but want to avoid US-based providers: MET Norway is hosted entirely on Norwegian infrastructure and stores no user data. Combined with Nominatim (also EU-hosted, OSM-backed) for geocoding, you can build a weather feature with zero data flowing outside the EU. Useful for products in healthcare, government, or education where data residency matters more than raw feature completeness.

Compared to the closest paid alternatives

vs Open-Meteo — Free: 10k/day non-commercial · Commercial: €29/month

Open-Meteo has more forecast variables, deeper history, and simpler API design. MET Norway has stronger provenance (government meteorological service, direct ECMWF pipeline). For technical excellence Open-Meteo wins; for institutional trustworthiness MET Norway wins. Many production apps use both — Open-Meteo primary, MET Norway fallback.

vs Weather Underground — No free tier since 2019 · Enterprise sales

Weather Underground was the classic personal weather station API for years but IBM's acquisition killed the free tier in 2019. Now paid-only with unclear pricing (must contact sales). For any use case where you'd have considered WU, use MET Norway or Open-Meteo instead.

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