API 3.7 Release

[kollymars]

We are pleased to announce the release of API 3.7. (with a quick rundown of 3.4, 3.5, 3.6.)

Here are all the changes since the previous notice we gave on 3.3):

New Features in 3.4

NOAA Weather Radio endpoint
As an enhancement to the endpoint added in 3.3, we have added a new areal endpoint for SSML content, /radio/{callSign}/broadcast. This endpoint is meant to mimic the broadcast suite from the NWR transmitter. With this release we now offer both a point based and areal SSML 1.0 endpoint.

In addition, NWR transmitter metadata is provided on the areal endpoint to include the transmitter call sign, frequency, and other information.

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.

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
Various performance fixes were also in this release.

New Features in 3.5

Radar Queue updates
In this release we updated /radar/queues/{host} endpoint to sort records by arrival time, and added some extra data to the /radar/servers endpoint.

Heat risk was added to the /gridpoint endpoint.

Our SSML endpoint on /points/lat,lon/radio now include all CAP products.

New Features in 3.6

In this release we added sunrise/sunset times to the /points/{lat},{lon} endpoint

We also added NWR data including references to the point and areal SSML documents to the /points/{lat,},{lon} endpoint

New Features in 3.7

In this release there are several improvements including many performance enhancements to make our service more responsive.

We also added endpoints which support weather stories and briefings at the following endpoints:
/offices/{officeId}/briefing
/offices/{officeId}/briefing/download/latest
/offices/{officeId}/briefing/download/{briefingId}
/offices/{officeId}/headlines
/offices/{officeId}/headlines/{headlineId}
/offices/{officeId}/weatherstories
/offices/{officeId}/weatherstories/download/{imageId}

There are also minor improvements to our SSML endpoint returns.

[tmabell]

This is a great enhancement! I found an issue with some of the new endpoints outlined above and have reported it via direct communication but in the interest of "the more you know" I will mention it here as well. I did a check of the weatherstories endpoint and found that many WFO's that generate a Story were missing from the API. They are: HUN, MOB, LOX, MTR, KEY, MFL, TAE, TBW, LIX, JAN, LKN, PHI, ABQ, EPZ, OKX, CTP, MRX, EWX, EPZ, MAF, LWX, and SEW.

It is possible that other endpoints may also be incomplete.

[mgwalker]

I don't know if it is the case with the ones you've identified, but not all WFOs are using the new tooling for creating weather stories yet. The new tooling handles getting them into the API, so once all the WFOs make the switch over, they will appear. But like I said, I don't know if the ones you've identified are using the new tools or not, so this info may not be relevant. 🙂

[tmabell]

This makes sense but there is still a lack of clarity here with regard to when these "missing" WFOs might be added. Is the tool that @mgwalker mentioned tied to an AWIPS build upgrade? If we knew that, we could assume a realistic timeline.