predictions with interval="hilo" return values as string

[Greg Clunies]

Requesting tide predictions with interval="hilo" returns the value as string. This creates issues for plotting (out of order y-axis values - see stack overflow answer here for explanation)

Example code that reproduces the issue:

# Get data from NOAA CO-OPS API
df_hl = coops.get_data(
    begin_date="20181224",
    end_date="20190107",
    stationid="9447717",
    product="predictions",
    datum="NAVD",
    interval="hilo",
    units="english",
    time_zone="lst_ldt")

df_hl.info()
<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
DatetimeIndex: 54 entries, 2018-12-24 06:52:00 to 2019-01-06 23:32:00
Data columns (total 2 columns):
hi_lo           54 non-null object
predicted_wl    54 non-null object
dtypes: object(2)
memory usage: 1.3+ KB

The datatype for predicted_wl should be float.

This issue should be checked for other products as well.

[Greg Clunies]

This is being addressed in new noaa_coops package.