Suggestions to get stations with good latest observation data

[14Slyfox]

Great API, and I'm getting everything to work fine. However, I've come across stations that return no latest observation data. This is what I'm attempting to do: Our company owns assets in different states. I get all the weather stations for those states and narrow the stations needed down (by finding the closest station to our assets based on lat/lon). Many assets share the same stations so I don't have to pull the same station multiple times. However, many of these stations do not have "latest observation" data available. Is there a way to determine what stations are actively updating their observations when I pull the stations? I would like to only retrieve stations that have current observation data. It would be nice to have a Boolean flag when getting the station data that the station is current. If anyone can recommend a solution/workaround it would be much appreciated.

[dwhitemv25]

The problem is, "what is the definition of current?" There's no parameter in API that I know of to specify what "current" is, and the observation time and frequency for each station is different -- some send observations every 15 minutes, some once per hour, and some are variable.

Can you be more specific as to what "current" is?

[14Slyfox]

When I say latest, I'm not really concerned with how long it was since the last update. I just want to know that the station that I get from the [/stations] request will return stations that work with the [/stations/{stationId}/observations/latest]. Is there something I should look for from the [/stations] response that will help identify reliable stations? For example, one of the stations I got back was: AN746. When I attempt to get the latest observation, I get this response:
Response Body
{
"correlationId": "17fb94a3",
"title": "Not Found",
"type": "https://api.weather.gov/problems/NotFound",
"status": 404,
"detail": "Not Found",
"instance": "https://api.weather.gov/requests/17fb94a3"
}
Response Headers
cache-control: private, must-revalidate, max-age=271
content-length: 225
content-type: application/problem+json
expires: Wed, 20 Nov 2024 00:02:45 GMT
pragma: no-cache
x-correlation-id: 18006c50
x-request-id: 6255531b-b538-4908-8ebb-693c25cb6fba
x-server-id: vm-bldr-nids-apiapp13.ncep.noaa.gov

[dwhitemv25]

I see what you mean. Hm, that particular station is non-traditional -- it is registered to the Oklahoma Department of Environmental Quality -- and its observations are missing from API, though I can see them on MesoWest. Out of curiosity, what is the API query that returns this station?

[14Slyfox]

One thing I have noticed is the 4 letter stations seem to be pretty reliable. The old process we had used the XML files, and I believe the index file that had all of the stations only contained 4 letter stations. I hate to limit down to just those stations if there are other reliable stations with longer station IDs.

[14Slyfox]

That was returned from this request:
https://api.weather.gov/stations?state=OK&limit=500