Find Aviation Weather Stations
aviation_find_stationsRead-onlyIdempotent
Resolve an airport or weather reporting station by its identifier, or discover stations within a bounding box or US state. Returns all identifier variants (ICAO/IATA/FAA), coordinates, elevation, and available data types (METAR, TAF, SYNOP, etc.). A lookup matches the registry's own identifier, which for an airport is its 4-letter ICAO ID (e.g., KSEA, KJFK); buoys and mesonet sites carry identifiers of other shapes and resolve by those. At least one of station_ids, bbox, or state is required. limit bounds how many stations an area search returns without changing the area searched, and belongs to the bbox and state modes only.
Input Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| bbox | No | Geographic bounding box for spatial queries. | |
| limit | No | Maximum stations to return, applied after ordering by ICAO identifier ascending with identifier-less stations last — so the same query with the same limit returns the same stations, and airports rather than unidentified sites lead the first page. It bounds the response without changing the area searched, which a smaller bbox or a different state would. Distinct from the 400-row upstream cap: a limited result examined every station it counted and withheld some, while a capped one never drew the rest. Belongs to the bbox and state modes; supplying it alongside station_ids is rejected, since that mode already names the set. Omit to return every match. Optional. | |
| state | No | Two-letter USPS code for one of the 50 US states or DC (e.g., "WA") to list all stations in that jurisdiction. US territories are not supported — use bbox for those. | |
| station_ids | No | One or more station identifiers (e.g., KSEA, KJFK). A lookup matches the registry's own identifier: a 4-letter ICAO ID for an airport, and other shapes for the buoys and mesonet sites the registry also carries, which resolve by those. A 3-letter IATA code (e.g., SEA) never resolves, even for a station whose entry carries one. Whitespace around an entry is trimmed, so a padded identifier resolves the same as the bare one; an empty or whitespace-only entry is rejected. Use bbox or state to discover identifiers by location. |
Output Schema
TableJSON Schema
| Name | Required | Description | Default |
|---|---|---|---|
| cap | No | The upstream row maximum that was applied to the draw. Present only on a truncated result. | |
| error | No | Present when the call failed. Absent on success. | |
| shown | No | Stations in this result, counted after any client-side state filter and after any limit. | |
| notice | No | Guidance for whichever disclosures fired: the lever that narrows a truncated draw, what a requested limit withheld, or the cause and fix for identifiers that resolved to nothing. The cap and the limit can both fire on one result, and the text keeps them apart; the reconciliation cannot join them, since only bbox and state reach the row cap or accept a limit, and only station_ids reconciles a request. | |
| limited | No | True when the requested limit withheld stations that matched — the caller asked to see fewer of them. False affirms the limit did not bite, so every matching station is here. Present only when the call supplied a limit. It never states anything about the upstream cap: a limited result examined every station it counted, while a truncated one never drew the rest. | |
| matched | No | Stations that matched this query before the limit selected from them. Present only on a limited result. Where the result is also truncated this counts the capped draw and not the search area — the stations the cap dropped were never examined, so no count can include them. | |
| missing | No | Requested identifiers absent from the result. Deduplicated the way returned is: a repeated or differently-cased identifier appears once, under its first spelling. Absent when none are missing. | |
| partial | No | True when a requested identifier resolved to nothing. False affirms every requested identifier resolved, which a count cannot establish — upstream case-folds and deduplicates, so a shorter list is not itself a gap. Present only on a station_ids lookup. | |
| returned | No | Requested identifiers that resolved, spelled as the caller wrote them rather than as upstream returned them. Deduplicated the way upstream deduplicates: a repeated or differently-cased identifier appears once, under its first spelling. Present only on a station_ids lookup. | |
| stations | No | Matching stations. | |
| requested | No | Station identifiers this call asked for, spelled as the caller wrote them and in the order given. Present only on a station_ids lookup — the bbox and state modes ask for an area, not a list. | |
| truncated | No | True when the upstream draw hit the AWC row cap, so stations inside the search area are missing from this result. False affirms the area was drawn in full, which a count alone cannot establish. | |
| upstreamRows | No | Rows AWC returned before the client-side state filter ran. Present only on a truncated state query the filter then narrowed, where the post-filter count sits below the cap and so cannot reveal the truncation on its own. |