How to Scrape Real-Time Weather Data with Python and BeautifulSoup

Since the beginning of winter, a widespread and prolonged cold, rain, snow, and ice weather event has affected many regions. To monitor the weather in real time, this article shows how to use a Python web crawler to collect weather data.

The target site is the Green Breath website, which provides free real‑time PM2.5 data from the China Environmental Monitoring Center, along with reports and research conclusions about air quality.

The implementation is straightforward: BeautifulSoup selectors are used to locate information such as region, time, AQI index, primary pollutant, PM2.5 concentration, and tips. The page to be scraped looks like the following:

In the page source, the target information is located as shown in the screenshot below:

When implementing the code in PyCharm, the difficulty lies in the syntax of BS4 selectors. Some cities may have no pollutant data for a given day, so the attribute wuranwu may be absent. An if statement or exception handling should be added to avoid errors. The key code snippet is illustrated below:

After running the script, you can right‑click to execute it, enter the pinyin of the city you are interested in in the console, and see the real‑time weather information and friendly tips for that region directly in the PyCharm console.

Given the current cold conditions, the article also advises readers to prioritize safety when traveling, using public transportation whenever possible and minimizing driving.