Skip to contents

gsdata: Interface to the GeoSphere Austria DataHub API (Data Access)

gsdata.Rd

This package allows convenient access to data provided by GeoSphere Austria (Austrias federal agency for geology, geophysics, climatology and meteorology) via their data API which exists since around mid 2023.

Details

The API not only provides access to station data (the one thing currently covered by this package; will be extended) but also access to spatial data; a catalogue which has been extended over and over again over the past 10 months. Details about all available data sets and their temporal and spatial extent can be found on their website:

Data request limit

The API has a request limit; a limit to how much data one is allowed to retrieve in one API request. Details on the current limit can be found in the GeoSphere Dataset API Documentation.

This package internally tries to estimate the request size and split the request into multiple batches in case one single request would (likely) exceed these limits.

Thus, one single call to e.g., gs_stationdata() can trigger multiple API calls. If used without expert = TRUE two initial calls are made to check if the data set requested does exist, and that the stations and parameters requested exist in this data set. If the data request needs to be split in addition, this can cause a series of calls to the API which also has a limit on number of requests per time.

In the worst case this causes a temporary ban (timeout due to too many requests) from the servers. One way around is to limit the number of requests per time, more details about this in the next section.

Cooldown time/limiting number of requests per time

Note that each function call can result in multiple API requests which can lead to a timeout (too many requests). To avoid running into timeout issues:

  • use expert = TURUE where possible as it lowers the number of calls to the api.

  • request data for multiple stations at once, especially when requesting short time periods/few parameters as, in the best case, all data can be retrieved on one single call (if below estimated data request limit).

  • wait between requests using e.g., Sys.sleep(...).

  • or use the packages own 'cooldown' option. By default, a cooldown time of 0.1 seconds is used (the minimum time between two requests. You can set a custom cooldown time via options('gsdata.cooldown' = 1). Will overwrite the default and ensure that there will be at least one second between consecutive API calls. If you have no time critical requests this is a good way to be nice to the data provider!

Author

Maintainer: Reto Stauffer reto.stauffer@uibk.ac.at (ORCID)