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MatthewFlamm / pynws

⛈️ A python library to asynchronously retrieve weather observation from NWS/NOAA
MIT License
33 stars 10 forks source link

API.Weather.gov provides slightly stale data without gusts and precipitation, better alternative in mind #226

Open SCBionicle opened 3 weeks ago

SCBionicle commented 3 weeks ago

In the small-large town areas with municipal airports (at least in Texas), api.weather.gov does not provide precipitation data (despite having rain sensor) or gust information. The API for some reason doesn't process that. Furthermore, the data seems to be 30 minutes - 1 hour old consistently as the API seems to provide the 2nd latest report.

I did some curl testing on different NOAA weather API's and found that aviationweather.gov provides more recent and better detailed data. Note: this does not substitute forecasting functionality. In addition, it seems that all weather reports appear to be within 15 minutes old, at least in my area.

See AviationWeather.gov API Docs

I suggest it might be worth building functionality to use aviationweather.gov, instead, for current weather conditions.

MatthewFlamm commented 3 weeks ago

Are you able to give an example of a station that has mismatches between data in the two APIs for the same observation report? My local station has identical data. I wouldn't be surprised that the other API has more fresh data, so I'm wondering if you are seeing differences only related to differences in which observation is being returned.