[api.met.no] End-of-lifed products on api.met.no

[api.met.no mailing list]

Dear API users,

first of all, we had some downtime yesterday around 12:00 UTC due to a
network reconfiguration which didn't go as planned. We apologize for the
inconvenience.

Secondly we have some changes to our products, mainly involving moving
existing alerts in proprietary formats to the new CAP standard:


Textlocation: discontinuation of flood and extreme warnings
-----------------------------------------------------------

>From May 2018 all "extreme" forecasts will only be delivered via MetAlerts.
This means those elements will no longer be present in the textlocation XML,
instead they must be fetched as CAP from the metalerts product on the API.

Also, since NVE now offers flood warnings in standard CAP format via their
API, there is no longer any requirement for the MET API to offer these in
our proprietary XML format. As such they will no longer be issued via
Textlocation, and the type parameter will be removed in a later update.

To download flood warnings in CAP format, please visit the NVE API at
http://api.nve.no/doc/flomvarsling/.


Extremeforecast discontinued
----------------------------

The extreme warnings have now been superceded by the metalerts product. The
extremeforecast service will be discontinued on May 1st, 2018.


Mountaineasterobservations discontinued
---------------------------------------

These manual reports from DNT (Den norske turistforening) have not been
produced for the last couple of years, so the product will be removed on
June 1st, 2018.


Changes to Sunrise
------------------

The existing version 1.1 will be phased out within a few months, to be
replaced by a new version 2.0 with the following changes:

The "simple request" will have:
- a new XML format, including enough data that most users will need
- a "days" parameter to indicate period (instead of from/to)
- times in local timezone instead of UTC
- a new "offset" parameter to indicate timezone

This will also fix a bug in the current version where we tried to guess the
timezone from the location and sometimes ended up on the wrong side of the
international date line. You can read some preliminary documentation here,
but not that the XML format is liable to change at any time:

https://api.met.no/weatherapi/sunrise/2.0/documentation

The "advanced request" (eventId*/eventVal* etc) will no longer be available
via api.met.no. Instead you will have several other options:

- download and compile the code yourself from
https://github.com/FrankThomasTveter/astro-api

- download a Docker image as described on
https://github.com/FrankThomasTveter/astro-api/wiki

- use our demo site at http://astro.met.no/astro
(note that this is currently not setup for production with load balancing,
redundancy etc.)

If you have any ideas or feature requests for the new Sunrise service,
please don't hesitate to contact us.


Best regards,

Geir Aalberg
API developer