Accessing NOAA web service with token

Question

I recently requested a NOAA "token" to access their data. However, I keep receiving a "Token parameter is required" 404 error. Here is the URL I am using (note token is not the real one):

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/locationcategories?Token=AbCdEfGhIjKl1234

I have been scouring google for about an hour now on just a simple example to see what I am doing wrong, but no luck. I'm hoping someone here can point out (and probably get a chuckle) what I am doing wrong.

Answer 1

I've figured out how to use their web services. It looks like you have to send the token as a header instead of directly in the URL. For example, you can download an add-on to your browser such as postman that allows you to send GET and POST requests to web servers. Then select the option to send a get request to the web server such as

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/datasets

Then select the option to add a header. For the header, enter token for the header and whatever the value of your token is for the value. Select the Send button and you should get a result. Hopefully this helps you or somebody else in the future. Most programming languages such as python, ruby, Java, C#, etc. should have an option to send headers using a GET request.

Answer 2

According to the documentation, the token must go in the header, not the url:

An example using curl:

curl -H "token:<token>" url

An example using jQuery:

$.ajax({ url:<url>, data:{<data>}, headers:{ token:<token> } })

Example url:

http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/data?datasetid=GHCND&locationid=ZIP:28801&startdate=2010-05-01&enddate=2010-05-01

Answer 3

In case anyone's trying to do this with PowerShell, here's an example:

$postparms =@{token="KkZJFCuahOZOxJFPaThisIsntAToken"}

Invoke-Restmethod -uri  http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/datasets -headers $postparms

Answer 4

In Python the following works:

import requests

my_headers = {'token' : 'xxxyyyzzz'}
response = requests.get('https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/datasets', headers=my_headers)
print(response.json())