Changes to precipitation API

Developers
1

The API currently contains four fields regarding precipitation:

  • Rain Accumulated in the previous 60 seconds
  • Local Daily Rain Accumulation (total since midnight)
  • Rain Accumulated Final (Rain Check) in the previous 60 seconds
  • Local Daily Rain Accumulation Final (Rain Check; total since midnight)

Until recently, the first two fields in the list above allowed developers to access the raw rain data recorded by a Tempest (or Sky sensor), while the second two fields allowed developers to access processed RainCheck data. Recently it appears that a change has been made to the API such that all these four fields only show processed RainCheck data.

@eric, please could you ask the Tempest developers to confirm whether this change was intentional, and whether there is any intention to continue to expose raw rainfall data to developers? In the Tempest app and website you still have the ability to toggle RainCheck display on and off (which suggest the raw rain data is stored on the Tempest servers), but there appears to be no way to currently access this data through the publicly accessible API.

Exposing only RainCheck data through the API does create issues for integrations (such as weewx) that track rain accumulation. RainCheck is a post-processing feature, but many integrations work in real time and do not expect to have to correct previous accumulation values. As a result, the total rain accumulation calculated through integrations doesn’t match either the raw rain value or the Rain Check value provided by Tempest.

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Daily Rainfall total different
API questions re: rain measurements
2

Hi Peter,

Pushed your question to the dev people. Hopefully some news soon.

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3

Thanks Eric. I wasn’t sure how to reach them directly as they are not on the forums so much nowadays

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4

I got confirmation that the raw data is not available in the API for now. Maintenance and upgrade work is ongoing, and while the team strives to keep the API as stable as possible, sometimes a data point is interrupted or replaced for a period.

This will go on for a few more weeks, probably until the changes are fully implemented. They apologize for the inconvenience.

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5

When you do stabilize the interface, can you please do an announcement and a changelog (!!!) with what changed. That is always a big help to devs.

(garmin changelogs tend to say ‘misc fixes’ - grrrrrrrrrr…)

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It would be cool if the company didn’t silently make these changes, leaving us to notice problems with our data and try to reverse-engineer what broke.

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Oh wow. I’m building a rain visualizer for iOS and I had been stumped on this for hours and why the API was returning different values from the app. It wasn’t until I had enabled NC rain that they lined up. It would be great to have this change officially documented.

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It’s been 20 more weeks. Any changes coming in the foreseeable future ?

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Tempest doesn’t seem to be very transparent about this issue. What’s the hold up?

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