Sustainable Energy At Airports

RETScreen gets it solar data from NASA. This data, and other similar data, is publicly available at the NASA SSE website. For both RETScreen and another energy modelling tool - HOMER - NASA provides packaged data which these tools embed into their shipped product.

RETScreen currently has no API, so an interesting proposition to test is whether there is an API for the weather data itself directly. SSA provides a front-end website to access this data, but unfortunately there is no web service or other API for programmatic access.

That leaves “screen scraping” as the only alternative, and it would be a really bad design decision to follow his path. The problem is that many assumptions need to be made about the parameters in, and the location of the data returned within the response HTML.

A minor cosmetic change to the website could alter the structure of the HTML, even only slightly, and completely break the parsing routine that extracts the output data.

There is other data sets available such as monthly averaged data in text files, subsets of data by region, and daily data, but again these are not accessible programmatically. A software system or tool could not make use of this data without a user having to navigate to the website, login, and download a file or submit a web query.

So, while it is nice of NASA to provide a web front-end to this data, and share it with RETScreen and HOMER, a web service API would be a real advance in providing accessibility to a much wider audience.