Accessing opendap endpoints for long timeseries

[birdage]

@dpsnowden following our conversation

ive stepped back up the tree to the root http://opendap.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/, the opendap server does not seem to have currents

[kwilcox]

I believe COOPS is retiring their custom OPeNDAP server and moving to THEDDS. You should be able to find all of the regional forecast models here: http://opendap.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/thredds/catalog.html

[dpsnowden]

@mchaouchi, do you also serve station data via OPeNDAP/THREDDS? Or is it just SOS and your custom SOAP service? We're looking for other ways to get longer time series data.

[mchaouchi]

We serve station data via OPeNDAP. However only a limited set of data products is available via OPeNDAP, and I am not sure if that service will be supported for much longer. http://opendap.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/dods/

In addition to SOS and SOAP services, there is a data API that is available for use. The data API supports JSON, CSV, and XML data formats. http://www.tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/api/

[birdage]

@mchaouchi, thanks for the info, im familiar with the tides and currents api. we were trying to use the discovered services via the catalog, but SOS is proving not to be ideal for long time series current data. The api seems to return just the near surface currents, which is not a problem just an observation to note.

[mchaouchi]

The API by default returns the real-time bin data. However, if you know which bin you are interested in getting its data you can specify that using the bin parameter as in the following URL

/api/datagetter?product=currents&begin_date=20130625&end_date=20130626&station=db0301&bin=5&time_zone=lst&units=english&application=web_services&format=xml

[birdage]

@mchaouchi thats good to know thank you! i must of missed that bit!

[birdage]

@mchaouchi ive been working with the tides and currents requests some more and ive noticed two interesting things, any ideas?

1) The request time can vary wildly for a 30 day request, i have a pause of 5 seconds between requests as well. The requests should all take less than 5 seconds to complete and all requests contain full data responses

2) sometimes i get a proxy error?

i think the number of requests might be bogging down the server?

[mchaouchi]

This is a live system and it can be affected by many things, and one of them is certainly the load. Plus if your requests are competing with other tasks (not only requests), you may experience a slowdown.

As per the proxy error, I hope that that does not happen often. Restarting services, deploying new versions of software, and other type of operational tasks can intervene and lead to that, but to my understanding that should be the exception.