I have written several command-line weather programs for different services -- many of which I had to abandon. For example, I wrote a popular one for Weather Underground that I had to retire because WU stopped allowing free access to their API.

My latest effort is one that just deals with NWS/NOAA directly, and reading this article has me wondering if part of their bandwidth trouble is a product of the way their API works.

The API is a huge set of linked JSON documents. So it very often happens that a request for data is actually half-a-dozen requests through embedded URLs (all of which are made by the client one after the other). It's all very logical in some ways, but at the same time a bit byzantine. I often wonder which entity is served by the way it's set up. From my perspective, it's easily the hardest API to work with. Weather Underground was wonderful, and so was Dark Sky (which I played with for awhile).

I've had people over the years ask if one or another of my tools could be used for large scale or very rapid weather data collection, but all of the services I have worked with throttle connections exactly as NOAA is proposing. I suppose I'm at least relieved to hear that they're not restricting access by independent developers!