Enhance data collection with weather data from The Weather Channel

Adobe has partnered with The Weather Company to bring the additional context of United States weather to the data collected via datastreams. You can use this data for analytics, targeting, and audience creation in Experience Platform.

There are three types of data that are available from The Weather Channel:

• Current Weather: The current weather conditions of the user, based on their location. This includes current temperature, precipitation, cloud coverage, and more.

• Forecasted Weather: The forecast includes the 1, 2, 3, 5, 7 and 10-day forecast for the user location.

• Triggers: Triggers are specific combinations that map to different semantic weather conditions. There are three different types of weather triggers:

  • Weather Triggers: Semantically meaningful conditions, such as cold or rainy weather. These can differ in their definitions between various climates.
  • Product Triggers: Conditions that would lead to the purchase of different types of products. For example: cold-weather forecasts could mean that purchases of rain coats are more likely.
  • Severe Weather Triggers: Severe weather warnings, like winter storm or hurricane warnings.

Prerequisites

Before you use weather data, make sure you meet the following prerequisites:

• You must license the weather data that you will use from The Weather Channel. They will then enable it on your account.
• Weather data is available only through datastreams. To use weather data, you must use Web SDK, Mobile Edge Extension or the Server API to include this data.
• Your datastream must have Geo Location enabled.
• Add the weather field group to the schema that you are using.

Provisioning

Once you have licensed the data from The Weather Channel, they will enable your account to access the data. Next, you must reach out to Adobe Customer Care to have the data enabled on your datastream. Once enabled, the data will automatically be appended.

You can validate that it is being added by running an edge trace with the debugger or by using Assurance to trace a hit through the Edge Network.

Schema configuration

You must add the weather field groups to your Experience Platform schema corresponding to the event dataset you are using in your datastream. There are five field groups available:

• Forecasted Weather
• Current Weather
• Product Triggers
• Relative Triggers
• Severe Weather Triggers

Access the weather data

Once your data is licensed and available, you can access it in various ways throughout the Adobe services.

Adobe Analytics

In Adobe Analytics, the weather data is available to map via processing rules, along with the rest of your XDM schema.

You can find the list of fields that you can map in the weather reference page. As with all XDM schemas, the keys are prefixed with a.x. For example, a field named weather.current.temperature.farenheit would show up in Analytics as a.x.weather.current.temperature.farenheit.

Adobe Customer Journey Analytics

In Adobe Customer Journey Analytics, the weather data is available in the dataset that is specified in the datastream. As long as the weather attributes are added to your schema, they are available to add to a data view in Customer Journey Analytics.

Real-Time Customer Data Platform

Weather data is available in the Real-Time Customer Data Platform, for use in audiences. Weather data is attached to events.

Since weather conditions change frequently, Adobe recommends that you set time constraints on the audiences, as shown in the example above. Having a cold day in the last day or two is much more impactful than having a cold day 6 months ago.

See the weather reference for the available fields.

Adobe Target

In Adobe Target, you can use weather data to drive personalization in real-time. Weather data is passed to Target as mBox parameters and you can access it via a custom mBox parameter.

The parameter is the XDM path to a specific field. See the weather reference for the available fields and their corresponding paths.

Next steps

After reading this document, you now have a better understanding of how you can use weather data across various Adobe solutions. To learn more about the weather data field mapping, see the field mapping reference.