Find the list of weather stations for specified cities

Question

I wrote some code which retrieves temperature data from three cities every hour for five days. My problem is that the default station from which WeatherData[] gets its data is sometimes unavailable. Therefore, I want to know how I can find the list of weather stations for a city so I can retrieve data from an alternative station when the default station is unavailable.

Answer 1

If you type this:

WeatherData[{"Chicago", 3}]
(* {"C3175", "KCGX", "C8163"} *)

you get the the list of the 3 nearest weather stations. And, you can also get the distance of the stations from the specified location:

WeatherData[{"Chicago", 3}, "StationDistance"]
(* {3.49298, 6.57245, 7.54408} *)

Or you can get other weather station properties, such as elevation, coordinates, date range, etc.:

WeatherData[#, "Elevation"] & /@ WeatherData[{"Chicago", 3}]
(* {198., 181., 183.} *)