Facing several errors during running the tutorial notebook

[akasom89]

Hello.

Harmony is a really exciting service.

When i was running the tutorial notebook, faced several errors in the below line :
job_id = harmony_client.submit(request)

1-Exception: ('Bad Request', 'Error: Coverages were not found for the provided variables: blue_var')

2-JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

I wonder if the service is running or not.

I also have a general question.
does not the Appears service have similar goals?

[vinnyinverso]

Hi - thanks for the interest! We've added this issue to our queue of things we need to investigate.

does not the Appears service have similar goals?

They do have similar goals. There are a couple of differences that come to mind however. AppEEARS has a user interface while Harmony does not. They also operate on different data sets using different services. Harmony also aims to unify services and data from multiple data centers, and be agnostic to scientific discipline (within earth science). Here is some more documentation on Harmony that you may find useful https://harmony.earthdata.nasa.gov/docs

[chris-durbin]

We were not able to reproduce the issue. I am wondering if there was an issue with the Common Metadata Repository (CMR) catalog at the time you were testing, or if you may have changed the collection that is used in the notebook. The blue_var variable is tied to the sample data collection used in that notebook. Are you seeing the same issue still when running the tutorial.ipynb notebook?

[needham-michael]

I received the same JSONDecodeError when working through the tutorial.

Minimal reproducible example

from harmony import BBox, Client, Collection, Request, Environment

harmony_client = Client(env=Environment.UAT)

request = Request(
    collection=Collection(id='C1234088182-EEDTEST'),
    spatial=BBox(-140, 20, -50, 60),
    crs='EPSG:3995',
    format='image/tiff',
    height=512,
    width=512
)

job_id = harmony_client.submit(request)

Which yields

JSONDecodeError: Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Minimal environment (Python 3.13)

Installed via uv add harmony-py

Package                Version
---------------------- -----------
certifi                2025.11.12
charset-normalizer     3.4.4
curlify                2.2.1
harmony-py             1.3.3
idna                   3.11
numpy                  2.3.5
pockets                0.9.1
progressbar2           4.2.0
python-dateutil        2.9.0.post0
python-dotenv          1.1.1
python-utils           3.9.1
requests               2.32.5
shapely                2.0.7
six                    1.17.0
sphinxcontrib-napoleon 0.7
typing-extensions      4.15.0
urllib3                2.5.0

[indiejames]

@needham-michael when did you submit this request? In any case the error you are seeing is because the library is trying to JSON decode a string that is not valid JSON, probably just an error message.

[needham-michael]

Hi @indiejames, I submitted the above request about the same time I submitted the comment to this thread, so looks like 12/3/2025 at 1:34 PM central time.

When I try

request.is_valid()

the output is True... Perhaps I am misunderstanding, is there some other way to validate the resulting JSON from the Request defined above is valid?

Edit

Adding in a bit more of the traceback. The error comes from harmony\client.py:

    546 if response.ok:
    547     if isinstance(request, OgcBaseRequest):
--> 548         if response.json()['status'] == 'successful':
    549             return response.json()
    550         else: