active status for COOPS stations

[carolakaiser]

When filtering the COOPS stations for being active like this:

coops_active = stations_coops[stations_coops['is_active']] # comes back as True/False

there are some results that show a station as active but those stations do either not exist on the https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov website or deliver a "No data was found" result.

What API do you use to get the active status (is it the NOAA OpenDap server or anything like that?)

Examples: https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/waterlevels.html?id=8632837 https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/waterlevels.html?id=8574728

[pmav99]

Hi Carola,

the COOPS API was developed by @zacharyburnett when he was still working for NOAA. I can't say that I am intimately familiar with COOPS. My understanding is that the station metadata are parsed from these HTML tables:

• https://access.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/nwsproducts.html?type=current#current
• https://access.co-ops.nos.noaa.gov/nwsproducts.html?type=current#hist

AFAIK the stations that are referenced in the first table are marked as active. In any case the pandas DataFrame that gets returned by the COOPS function contains a column named status which is what we use in order to figure out the value of the is_active column.

I don't think that COOPS provide a timestamp, so we can't infer the value in the same way we do for IOC.

[zacharyburnett]

@pmav99 is correct, currently the module uses those pages to determine active status. Both of those stations are on the "active" list; I can look into adding querying of the data to the status checker.

[pmav99]

I guess, this has been resolved. If not feel free to reopen and provide additional information. Closing