Common Misconceptions About the NOAA's NDFD
The NDFD is a magical and wonderful API, but in my experience it is easy to make assumptions about the kind of data it holds and spend a lot of time doing stupid things.
Sometimes a Forecast is Just a Forecast
Don't try to use the NDFD as a "good enough" approximation of current weather conditions unless you want your users to hate you. I made the mistake of thinking the data was close enough to actual current conditions to use in a project of mine.
The NDFD is nice and contains lots of data, but make no mistake, the thing only has forecasts, and most of the weather elements occur in 3 hour increments. This means that the data retrieved is usually not representative of actual weather conditions any given location, so 99% of the time NDFD will give an approximation or guess - a forecast if you will - of weather conditions...nothing more!
SOAP is not cool, and knowing it will not make people like you.
Last year I was trying to get weather data out of NDFD and thought SOAP was the way to go - not so! The SOAP interface for NDFD (maybe all SOAP interfaces?) is clunky, ugly, and hard to use.
Luckily you don't have to use SOAP with the NDFD API! The NOAA happily buried the documentation for a more modern REST API at the bottom of the API page. Just Use requests to get the data via the REST API and call it a day.
