Being retired, I’ve embarked on a project to keep my brain working as well as keeping my dwindling Python skills from completely disappearing. 

I’ve been tinkering around with an API that allows me to grab time sequence weather data from a DOT weather station. As with most APIs the data is returned as a json object which to me (and Python) is a really ugly dictionary embedded with subsequent dictionaries that have keys and associated lists/tuples of values.  For example one such dictionary has the AirTemp as the key with quarter hour values for as many hours I scrape. There are as many of these dictionaries as weather variables I choose to download : wind speed,direction, etc etc. 

My approach to parsing the json object into something readable is to filter out each of the weather variable data into their own dictionary followed by creating a list of all the values in the data dictionary.  

Finally, I zip those lists together and create a dictionary of the date/time variable as the key with the various weather variable values in a list associated to that specific date/time. 

I’m just wondering if there might be different approach would be more efficient (and Pythonic). Sometimes I feel like I'm beating data into submission rather than processing it. This is the first time ever scripting to an API and parsing a json object. 

import requests,json

weather_url = "https://api.weatherdata.com/v2/stations/timeseries?&token=MyToken&units=temp|f,speed|mph&stid=UTHEB&vars=wind_speed,wind_direction,air_temp&obtimezone=local&start=202603031700&end=202603032200"

response = requests.get(weather_url)
responseStatusCode = (response.status_code)

if responseStatusCode == 200:
    print(f"Connected to Weather Data Server; data incoming")
    jsonStr = response.json()

    tempDict = jsonStr['STATION'][0]#dictionary in json object with data
    obsDict = tempDict['OBSERVATIONS']#dictionary in station of data

    #begin list creation:

    dateList = obsDict['date_time']
    localDateList =[i.replace("T"," ").replace(":00-0700","-MT").replace("TimeStamp: ","") for i in dateList]

    airTempList = obsDict['air_temp_set_1']
    windSpeedList = obsDict['wind_speed_set_1']
    windDirectionList = obsDict['wind_direction_set_1']

    displayDict= {date: [speed,direction,temp]
    for date,speed,direction,temp in zip(localDateList,windSpeedList,windDirectionList,airTempList)}
    for key,value in displayDict.items():
        print(f"Date-Time: {key} WindSpeed MPH: {value[0]} WindDirection Degrees: {value[1]}  AirTemp: {value[2]}")
else:
    print(f"Unable to connect to Weather Data Server: try again later")