EPA Disclaimer

Note

This software/application was developed by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA). No warranty expressed or implied is made regarding the accuracy or utility of the system, nor shall the act of distribution constitute any such warranty. The USEPA has relinquished control of the information and no longer has responsibility to protect the integrity, confidentiality or availability of the information. Any reference to specific commercial products, processes, or services by service mark, trademark, manufacturer, or otherwise, does not constitute or imply their endorsement, recommendation or favoring by the USEPA. The USEPA seal and logo shall not be used in any manner to imply endorsement of any commercial product or activity by the USEPA or the United States Government.

AQS Data Mart Disclaimer

Warning

US EPA’s AQS Data Mart API V2 is currently in beta phase of development, the API interface has not been finalized. This means that certain functionality of the API may change or be removed without notice. As a result, this package is also currently marked as beta and may also change to reflect any changes made to the Data Mart API or in respect to improvements in the design, functionality, quality and documentation of this package. The authors assume no liability for any problems that may occur as a result of using this package, the Data Mart service, any software, service, hardware, or user accounts that may utilize this package.

Introduction

The pyaqsapi module for the python 3 programming environment allows a python 3 programming environment to connect to and retrieve data from the United States Environmental Protection Agency’s (US EPA) Air Quality System (AQS) Data Mart API v2 (Air Quality System) interface directly. This package enables the data user to omit legacy challenges including coercing data from a JSON object to a usable python 3 object, retrieving multiple years of data, formatting API requests, retrieving results, handling credentials, requesting multiple pollutant data and rate limiting data requests. All the basic functionality of the API have been implemented that are available from the AQS API Data Mart server. The library connects to AQS Data Mart API via Hypertext Transfer Protocol (HTTP) so there is no need to install external ODBC drivers, configure ODBC connections or deal with the security vulnerabilities associated with them. Most functions have a parameter, return_header which by default is set to FALSE. If the user decides to set return_header to TRUE, then that function will return a python 3 AQSAPI_V2 object. An AQSAPI_V2 object has instance methods for retrieving the data requested, header information, and other metadata related to the API call. After each call to the API a five second stall is invoked to help prevent overloading the Data Mart API server and to serve as a simple rate limit.

About the timeliness of AQS Data

EPA's AQS Data Mart API, the service that pyaqsapi retrieves data from, does not host real time (collected now/today) data. If real time data is needed, please use the AirNow API and direct all questions toward real time data there. pyaqsapi does not work with AirNow and cannot retrieve real time data. For more details see section 7.1 of the About AQS Data page.

About RAQSAPI

pyaqsapi is a port of RAQSAPI to the python 3 programming environment. For anyone that is familiar with RAQSAPI, the pyaqsapi API will feel familiar to you, most of the functions are similar and the parameters sent to each functions are the same. pyaqsapi aims to have feature parity with RAQSAPI and neither project will have features that the other project does not - other than programming language environment or language preference there is no benefit to using one package over the other.

Install pyaqsapi

To install pyaqsapi first clone the pyaqsapi repository.

git clone https://github.com/USEPA/pyaqsapi.git

Next, in the project's root directory use pip to install the proper dependencies that are required to build and install pyaqsapi.

cd pyaqsapi
pip install -r requirements.txt

While still in the project's root directory use setuptools to build and pip to install the package.

python -m build . && python -m pip install .

Load pyaqsapi

Like any other python package make sure that you are loading pyaqsapi in the same virtual environment where pyaqsapi was installed. Load pyaqsapi in the same any other python package is loaded.

import pyaqsapi as aqs

Using pyaqsapi

For those who are already familiar with using RAQSAPI then the pyaqsapi API should feel familiar with a few minor differences regarding how the data is returned.

All data is returned using pandas DataFrames. Exported functions from pyaqsapi have a parameter RETURN_HEADER, by default this parameter is False. When False these functions simply return the requested data as a pandas DataFrame. If RETURN_HEADER is manually set to True an AQSAPI_V2 python 3 object is returned. Use the get_data() class method to retrieve the data, get_header() class method to retrieve header information.

Sign up and setting up user credentials with the pyaqsapi library

If you have not already done so you will need to sign up with AQS Data Mart using aqs_sign_up function, this function takes one input, email, which is a python 3 character object, that represents the email address that you want to use as a user credential to the AQS Data Mart service. After a successful call to aqs_sign_up an email message will be sent to the email address provided with a new Data Mart key which will be used as a credential key to access the Data Mart API. The aqs_sign_up function can also be used to regenerate a new key for an existing user, to generate a new key simply call the aqs_sign_up function with the parameter email set to an existing account. A new key will be e-mailed to the account given.

The credentials used to access the Data Mart API service are stored in as a python global variable that needs to be set every time the pyaqsapi module is loaded or the key is changed. Without valid credentials, the Data Mart server will reject any request sent to it. The key used with Data Mart is a key and is not a password, so the pyaqsapi package does not treat the key as a password; this means that the key is stored in plain text and there are no attempts to encrypt Data Mart credentials as would be done for a username and password combination. The key that is supplied to use with Data Mart is not intended for authentication but only account monitoring. Each time pyaqsapi is loaded and before using any of it’s functions use the aqs_credentials function to enter in the user credentials so that pyaqsapi can access the AQS Data Mart server.

Both pyaqsapi and RAQSAPI use the US Environmental Protection Agency's Air Quality Service Data Mart to retrieve data. The same credentials can be used for access to either project. Note however, that AQS and AQS Data Mart are similar and related data sources, however the credentials used to access AQS are not the same as those used to access AQS Data Mart.

Note

The credentials used to access AQS Data Mart API are not the same as the credentials used to access AQS. AQS users who do not have access to the AQS Data Mart will need to create new credentials. However, you may use the same credentials used in RAQSAPI in pyaqsapi since RAQSAPI uses the same AQS Data Mart API as pyaqsapi.

Data Mart aggregate functions

Note

AQS Data Mart API restricts the maximum amount of monitoring data to one full year of data per API call. These functions are able to return multiple years of data by making repeated calls to the API. Each call to the Data Mart API will take time to complete. The more years of data being requested the longer pyaqsapi will take to return the results.

These functions retrieve aggregated data from the Data Mart API and are grouped by how each function aggregates the data. There are 7 different families of related aggregate functions in which the AQS Data Mart API groups data.

These seven families are:

• by site (aqs.bysite)
• by county (aqs.bycounty)
• by state (aqs.bystate)
• by latitude/longitude bounding box (aqs.bybox)
• by monitoring agency (aqs.byma)
• by Primary Quality Assurance Organization (aqs.bypqao)
• by core based statistical area (as defined by the US census Bureau) (aqs.bycbsa).

Within these families of aggregated data functions there are functions that call on the 13 different aggregate services that the Data Mart API provides. Note that not all aggregations are available for each service.

These thirteen services are:

• Monitors (*monitors)
• Sample Data (*sampledata)
• Daily Summary Data (*dailydata)
• Annual Summary Data (annualdata)
• Quality Assurance - Blanks Data (*qa_blanks)
• Quality Assurance - Collocated Assessments (*qa_collocated_assessments)
• Quality Assurance - Flow Rate Verifications (*qa_flowrateverification)
• Quality Assurance - Flow Rate Audits (*aqs_qa_flowrateaudit)
• Quality Assurance - One Point Quality Control Raw Data (*qa_one_point_qc)
• Quality Assurance - PEP Audits (*qa_pep_audit)
• Transaction Sample - AQS Submission data in transaction Format (RD) (*transactionsample)
• Quality Assurance - Annual Performance Evaluations (*qa_annualpeferomanceeval)
• Quality Assurance - Annual Performance Evaluations in the AQS Submission transaction format (RD) (*qa_annualpeferomanceevaltransaction)

Aggregate functions are named aqs.<aggregation>.<service>() where <service> is one of the 13 services listed above and <aggregation> is either bysite, bycounty, bystate, bybox, bycbsa, byma or bypqao.

Read the full API documentation online.