Access to World Weather and NOAA Severe Weather Inventory Databases

[#1]

Forecasters and econometricians need access to data, and SAS/ETS has long provided easy access to many commercial and government databases, including:

• Commercial database vendors: FAME, DRI, Standard & Poor’s (COMPUSTAT), FactSet, Haver Analytics DLX and CRSP.
• Federal Reserve Economic Data (FRED).
• US government data: Bureau of Economic Analysis, Bureau of Labor Statistics.
• International agency data: International Monetary Fund (IMF), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
• SAS/ACCESS® interfaces and SAS Data Surveyors (licensed separately) provide seamless read, write and update access to other data sources.

Since the latest 2016 release, SAS/ETS now includes access to two sources of weather-related data:

• World Weather Online.
• NOAA Severe Weather Data Inventory (SWDI) web service.

The SAS/ETS data access interface LIBNAME engines (SASERAIN and SASENOAA) provide seamless, efficient access to weather events and weather time series data supplied by World Weather Online and the NOAA Severe Weather Data Inventory web services.

The SASERAIN interface LIBNAME engine includes the following features:

• enables SAS users to retrieve weather data from the World Weather Online website
• uses the LIBNAME statement to enable you to download World Weather Online data and to specify which weather data time series you want to retrieve based on up to nine locations
• works with the SAS DATA step to write the selected weather data to a SAS data set
• selects past weather data based on a date range within 60 days prior to today for free nonpremium data (for premium data, the range must start no earlier than July 1, 2008)
• selects local forecast data based on a range defined by number of days (starts today), premium returns up to 15 days, and nonpremium (free) returns up to 5 days
• enables you to select the frequency of data, whether daily, hourly, every three hours, or otherwise
• maintains the sort order, so the locations (q-codes) are sorted in the resulting SAS data set by the order specified in the QUERY= option, by date (time ID), and by variable (time series item name)
• works with the SAS DATA step to perform further subsetting and to store weather data in a SAS data set
• supports TLS connectivity by obtaining a secure connection using the CONNECT method (if necessary) and a PROXY
• creates an XML map of the data for dynamic, flexible association of SAS formats and informats for all variables

The SASENOAA interface LIBNAME engine includes the following features:

• enables SAS users to access severe weather data sets, such as those for tornado vortex signatures (NX3TVS), storm cell structure (NX3STRUCTURE), and preliminary local storm reports (PLSR)
• works with the SAS DATA step to write the selected NOAA data to a SAS data set
• selects data based on geospatial limits, such as by a bounding box or a centerpoint-radius combination
• selects data based on a date range
• returns data in these formats:
  • XML; data are returned in XML format
  • KMZ; data are returned in zipped KML format for Google My Maps (plot data on a map)
  • SHP; mapping data are returned in zipped Esri format (four files returned inside ZIP file)
• works with the SAS DATA step to perform further subsetting and to store the resulting time series in a SAS data set
• supports TLS connectivity by obtaining a secure connection using the CONNECT method (if necessary) and a PROXY
• creates an XML map of the data for dynamic, flexible association of SAS formats and informats for all variables

[ChrisBrooks]

Interesting - I must try these libnames out!

[mich1]

Here is an example which uses a token to get this data via REST api

filename response temp;
proc http
url="https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/api/v2/datasets"
method= "GET"
out=response;
headers
"token"="YOURTOKENHERE";
run;
libname DATA JSON fileref=response;
Data DATA;
set DATA.ALLDATA;
run;

-bread crumbs and circuses for all