Accessing weather information with NOAA

Question

I was following a tutorial at https://towardsdatascience.com/getting-weather-data-in-3-easy-steps-8dc10cc5c859 and ran into a problem, if I copied and pasted the code exactly how they had it, it worked fine. However, if I change the station ID then I got an error, it doesn't matter which station I changed it to.

import requests
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import json
from datetime import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


Token = 'YourTokenHere'

station_id = 'GHCND:USW00023129'
station_id1 = 'GHCND:USC00107689'
station_id2 = 'GHCND:USW00003122'

#initialize lists to store data
dates_temp = []
dates_prcp = []
temps = []

#for each year from 2015-2019 ...
for year in range(2015, 2017):
    year = str(year)
    print('working on year '+year)
    
    #make the api call
    r = requests.get('https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/data?datasetid=GHCND&datatypeid=TAVG&limit=1000&stationid='
                     +station_id1+'&startdate='+year+'-01-01&enddate='+year+'-12-31', headers={'token':Token})
    
    
    #load the api response as a json
    d = json.loads(r.text)
    #get all items in the response which are average temperature readings
    avg_temps = [item for item in d['results'] if item['datatype']=='TAVG']
    #get the date field from all average temperature readings
    dates_temp += [item['date'] for item in avg_temps]
    #get the actual average temperature from all average temperature readings
    temps += [item['value'] for item in avg_temps]

If I use station_id GHCND:USW00023129 it works fine. If I use station_id1 or 2 (or any other station_id, I've tried several) I get this error:

runfile('D:/Code/Weather/Weather.py', wdir='D:/Code/Weather')
working on year 2015
Traceback (most recent call last):

  File "D:\Code\Weather\Weather.py", line 36, in <module>
    avg_temps = [item for item in d['results'] if item['datatype']=='TAVG']

KeyError: 'results'

Thanks

Also, please update your code example so that we can copy/paste it and try ourselves. The missing variables are pretty clear, but it will be much easier for us to help you (and you will get an answer more quickly) if you provide specific examples for `station_id` and `year` as variables in code so that we see consistent results compared to what you see. — Code-Apprentice, Dec 29 '20 at 16:21
The years I use don't seem to matter, it will always crash on the first one. — Kaden Shaw, Dec 29 '20 at 16:51
What is the error message when it crashes? Please [edit] your question to include it. — Code-Apprentice, Dec 30 '20 at 00:06
Tip: do `d = r.json()` instead of `d = json.loads(r.text)`. IDK if this will fix the error, but it is the correct way to get JSON from the response body. — Code-Apprentice, Dec 30 '20 at 00:09
Using ```d = r.json()``` has the same issue, works with that one station id only — Kaden Shaw, Dec 30 '20 at 04:30
I suggest pulling out some debugging skills (or learning them). The error tells you that `d` does not have a key `'results'`. You will have to figure out why. To do this, you can either use an inline debugger or add `print()` statements to see what is going on. Check out [this article](https://ericlippert.com/2014/03/05/how-to-debug-small-programs/) for more detailed tips about debugging your code. — Code-Apprentice, Dec 30 '20 at 17:42
Thank you, that is what I tried, but couldn't find much, I also tried several other stations (I found some that worked) and determined that many of the stations simply didn't have the data I was looking for. Not sure why, I think I need to dig into the documentation a bit more. — Kaden Shaw, Dec 31 '20 at 01:21

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered Jan 20 '22 at 18:17

"results" is returning a key error because your .get is not returning a response. It seems that NOAA has updated their api formats at some time, and a lot of the material out there is not quite working anymore, including the referenced Towards Data Science article.

If you are just getting started, this format will return a json file with results, and hopefully you can adapt it from there:

import requests
import json
from datetime import datetime

token = 'yourtoken'

url = "http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/data?datasetid=GHCNDMS&startdate=1776-07-04&enddate=1776-09-04"
headers = {"token":token}

r = requests.get(url, "dataset", headers = headers).text
print(r)
response = json.loads(r)
response = response['results']
response = response[0]
print(response)

Accessing weather information with NOAA

1 Answers1