Potential Bug (or My Own Mistake) in Building of Data Query Using "synopitic.services.stations_timeseries"

[mariandob]

Hello to Brian and SynopticPy Users,

My name is Marian and I am a graduate student in Geography who recently came across this great SynopticPy repository that Brian created (Thank you, Brian).

I followed the directions for creating/installing the synoptic environment from the "environment.yml" provided in the documentation and am just now testing things out to download some data from a single station. I have generated a token and input that into the config file. Following an example in this repository I used the following code to try and download some data:

#Import packages/functions
from datetime import datetime
from synoptic.services import stations_timeseries

#Download some data!
data = stations_timeseries(
    stdid=['KSBA'], 
    vars=['air_temp'], 
    start=datetime(2022,5,11), 
    end=datetime(2022,5,12)
)

Upon running this code, I was greeted with the following error message:

AssertionError: 🛑 There are errors in the API request 
https://api.synopticdata.com/v2/stations/timeseries?stdid=KSBA&vars=air_temp&start=202205110000&end=202205120000&token=1107d960a32a4ae8b29aa8ea0c02d540. 
Querying too many station hours. 1571688.0 hours were requested.

Interestingly, and if my code is correct as is, there seems to be a potential issue somewhere with the start and/or end times when creating the request using python/SynopticPy. I went ahead and tried to build an identical request manually on the Synoptic website and ended up with a working request that looked like:

https://api.synopticdata.com/v2/stations/timeseries?&token=1107d960a32a4ae8b29aa8ea0c02d540&start=202205110000&end=202205120000&vars=air_temp&stid=KSBA

I was wondering if anyone had any idea what may be the issue here? I was thinking it could be the order in which the python function, "stations_timeseries", is putting the various request variables, but this doesn't seem to have a clear affect on making the request valid or invalid. Also, from all the available working examples on this repository, I find it more likely that I am doing something wrong and not the code. If it is helpful, I can provide additional details about my specific computer/conda/python setup.

Thank you for your time spent reading this, and for any assistance you may be able to provide.

Best,

Marian

UPDATE: I tried running a metadata request for this station (KSBA) to ensure that I could could get some output. My code was the following, and it indeed produced output of the metadata for KSBA:

from synoptic.services import stations_metadata
stations_metadata(stid='KSBA')

I also ran two identical cells for requesting the timeseries data and one of them worked, while the other still produced the error mentioned above. I am attaching a commented Jupyter Notebook file to help with debugging:
code_synoptic_station_download.ipynb.zip

Final Update: Fixed!

I found out that there was a typo in the "stid" parameter for the "stations_timeseries" function. Originally (see above) I wrote this parameter as "stdid" and not "stid". Fixing this typo has now resulted both identical (or so I thought) Jupyter cells to run and fetch the data correctly. My apologies for this long discussion. Hopefully this may help someone down the line if they encounter this type of issue.

[blaylockbk]

Hi @mariandob, I'm glad you like using SynopticPy. Sounds like you got it working by fixing the typo stdid to stid.

I should have it print a warning when an unknown parameter is used. That might help someone identify this issue easier.

Keep sharing in the discussions! Happy research 😎