How to get a time zone from a location using latitude and longitude coordinates?

Question

Given the latitude and longitude of a location, how does one know what time zone is in effect in that location?

In most cases, we are looking for an IANA/Olson time z

Answer 1

We at Teleport just started opening up our API's and one of the usecases is also exposing TZ information for coordinates.

For example one could request all our available TZ information for coordinates in following manner:

curl -s https://api.teleport.org/api/locations/59.4372,24.7453/?embed=location:nearest-cities/location:nearest-city/city:timezone/tz:offsets-now | jq '._embedded."location:nearest-cities"[0]._embedded."location:nearest-city"._embedded."city:timezone"'

This would return the following

{
  "_embedded": {
    "tz:offsets-now": {
      "_links": {
        "self": {
          "href": "https://api.teleport.org/api/timezones/iana:Europe%2FTallinn/offsets/?date=2015-09-07T11%3A20%3A09Z"
        }
      },
      "base_offset_min": 120,
      "dst_offset_min": 60,
      "end_time": "2015-10-25T01:00:00Z",
      "short_name": "EEST",
      "total_offset_min": 180,
      "transition_time": "2015-03-29T01:00:00Z"
    }
  },
  "_links": {
    "self": {
      "href": "https://api.teleport.org/api/timezones/iana:Europe%2FTallinn/"
    },
    "tz:offsets": {
      "href": "https://api.teleport.org/api/timezones/iana:Europe%2FTallinn/offsets/{?date}",
      "templated": true
    },
    "tz:offsets-now": {
      "href": "https://api.teleport.org/api/timezones/iana:Europe%2FTallinn/offsets/?date=2015-09-07T11%3A20%3A09Z"
    }
  },
  "iana_name": "Europe/Tallinn"
}

For the example I used ./jq for JSON parsing.