API 3.3 Release

[StephenClouse]

We are pleased to announce the release of API 3.3. (As to what happened to 3.0 through 3.2, it's a long story.)

Here are all the changes since the previous production release (2.6):

New Features

NOAA Weather Radio endpoint

We have been working on part of an agency initiative to modernize and expand the capabilities of NOAA Weather Radio. To that end, we have added a new endpoint /points/{latitude},{longitude}/radio which will give you a hyper-local NWR broadcast based on your exact location. This endpoint returns a text-to-speech script in SSML 1.1 format.

Currently the script contains the following information:

• A roundup of nearby observations
• Hazardous Weather Outlook
• 7-Day Forecast

This is not intended to replace NOAA Weather Radio (there is no real-time alerting, for starters) but the start of an experiment to show stakeholders what can be done.

There is definitely more to come on this. We have additional features and performance and text enhancements coming in the future.

Developer Note: Many text-to-speech services, such as Amazon Polly or Google TTS, only support a limited subset of SSML. You may need to do some filtering of the XML to get a document acceptable to your TTS engine.

Changes and Fixes

• Observation lists are now paginated.
• stationId and stationName are now part of observation records.
• API-Key has been added to the security schemes in OpenAPI. We are not ready to flip that switch yet (there will be plenty of warning when we do), but it's in the documentation now.
• Fixed handling of observations with VV (vertical visibility) sky coverage code.
• /alerts endpoints no longer use the Last-Modified header due to caching issues.
• /aviation/cwsus were not being serialized correctly.
• Retrieving large collections from /zones should perform much better.

[michael-garofalo]

Ah! That's interesting! 🤔

I had already added a text-to-speech summary in my Widgets app, but that used the seven-day text. The “radio” text is different. So, perhaps that could be useful too. Nice! 🙂

I've been considering bringing back the app as PWA, perhaps late next year.

Here are some lines from the XML…

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<speak version="1.1" xml:lang="en-US">
     <p><s>Here is your NOAA Weather Radio point forecast.</s></p>
     <p><s>Here is your area weather roundup.</s></p>

Are those HTML tags? If so, why is the strikethrough tag being added? 🤔

It also seems to do this a lot…

          </s><s> </s></p>

Extra tags for just a trailing space, that seems unnecessary.

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Adding Weather alerts to the Widgets app seems like a good idea too. So, it's nice to see there's continued development with the weather.gov API.

Just a side note, one of the main reasons I've been using the weather.gov API is because it doesn't bother me with an API key. That's been quite nice! 🙂

[atticuscornett]

Would like to second the API key point - this API is one of the exceedingly few weather data APIs that don't require an API key, and requiring an API key probably causes major issues for me. Thank you for keeping us updated!

[kollymars]

For SSML Tags and what they indicate please see https://docs.aws.amazon.com/polly/latest/dg/supportedtags.html

[StephenClouse]

or Section 3 of the SSML spec

[netbymatt]

Thank you for the update! I appreciate the continued work on this API!

I am also worried about how having an API key will affect the app that I manage. I run the web-based Weatherstar 4000 which has a significant number of daily users who come for the nostalgia in addition to their forecast.

I've always kept the code for this available and readable as a learning tool for anyone who wants to get into front-end development. Part of what makes that possible is that you can download the code and run it to start experimenting. No additional steps for obtaining and entering an API key somewhere.

My second concern is that if I had to add an API key I'd no longer be able to afford the cost to proxy all of the API requests that make the site run for each user through CloudFront (currently) or any other hosting option so that I would not expose my API key in the frontend.

I hope that we're able to keep this API open to everyone to support the non-commercial use cases and curious programmers out there.

[scadergit]

The NWS API will remain a service provided by the US Gov, and the API key will be used to better assess needs of the service. What you may do today without the key will remain after the feature is enabled.