GDELT 2.0 Television API Now Supports Timezone Adjustment

Historically the GDELT 2.0 TV API operated entirely in the UTC timezone. This simplified date operations and ensured that results could be interpreted universally, but made it difficult to localize coverage to align it with the events it describes. Many visualization, statistical and analytic packages require cumbersome workflows to perform timezone conversions and require using third party packages, rather than being able to visualize the results entirely in the TV API.

To address this, the TV API now fully supports all the major timezones seen below. Timezones are treated as-is with the given UTC offset applied over the entire analytic window, meaning that applying UTC-5:00 to a 2009-2018 query will employ an offset of -5 hours over the entire time frame, it will NOT adjust it to account for daylight savings periods over that timespan.

Note that specifying a timezone offset will cause the TV API to automatically interpret the start/stop date/time of the query in that timezone and all output formats will be adjusted to that timezone.

Set the timezone using "timezoneadj=" and one of the numbers below. Note that textual timezone names are not supported.

  • -12:00
  • -11:00
  • -10:00
  • -09:30
  • -09:00
  • -08:00
  • -07:00
  • -06:00
  • -05:00
  • -04:00
  • -03:30
  • -03:00
  • -02:30
  • -02:00
  • -01:00
  • +00:00
  • +01:00
  • +02:00
  • +03:00
  • +03:30
  • +04:00
  • +04:30
  • +05:00
  • +05:30
  • +05:45
  • +06:00
  • +06:30
  • +07:00
  • +08:00
  • +08:45
  • +09:00
  • +09:30
  • +10:00
  • +10:30
  • +11:00
  • +12:00
  • +12:45
  • +13:00
  • +13:45
  • +14:00