This tool functions as an interface to the extensive weather data in the NOAA GHCN database. No manually digging through the FTP server or going through Google Big Query, just directly download your station's weather from the command line.
Run this tool from the command line to:
- Search for a Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) station ID using plain text
- Download a station's daily weather data in raw .dly format
- Download a station's daily weather data in a reformatted .csv for easy analysis
The format of each station's daily measurements are fixed width files with one row per month per element, and multiple columns for the days:
------------------------------
Variable Columns Type
------------------------------
ID 1-11 Character
YEAR 12-15 Integer
MONTH 16-17 Integer
ELEMENT 18-21 Character
VALUE1 22-26 Integer
MFLAG1 27-27 Character
QFLAG1 28-28 Character
SFLAG1 29-29 Character
VALUE2 30-34 Integer
MFLAG2 35-35 Character
QFLAG2 36-36 Character
SFLAG2 37-37 Character
. . .
. . .
. . .
VALUE31 262-266 Integer
MFLAG31 267-267 Character
QFLAG31 268-268 Character
SFLAG31 269-269 Character
This tool parses all of the station's available data and outputs it with one row per day, and multiple columns for the elements. This is easier to analyze programattically and read, as seen below:
The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) is an integrated database of climate summaries from land surface stations across the globe that have been subjected to a common suite of quality assurance reviews. The data are obtained from more than 20 sources. Some data are more than 175 years old while others are less than an hour old. GHCN is the official archived dataset, and it serves as a replacement product for older NCEI-maintained datasets that are designated for daily temporal resolution
The five core elements (measurements) are:
- PRCP = Precipitation (tenths of mm)
- SNOW = Snowfall (mm)
- SNWD = Snow depth (mm)
- TMAX = Maximum temperature (tenths of degrees C)
- TMIN = Minimum temperature (tenths of degrees C)
For a full list of possible elements (measurements) see the codebook.
The five core elements which are recorded by most stations are precipitation, snow, snow depth, max temp, and min temp. There are several other attributes that may or may not be recorded in each station's dataset including: average cloudiness, average daily wind direction, average daily wind speed, water evaporation, time of fastest wind, frozen ground layer depth, water depth gauge heights, evaporation pan water temperature, percent of day that is sunshine, soil temp, soil type, ice thickness, direction of fastest winds, weather type, multiday measurements, and number of days included in multiday measurements. There are also flags indicating measurement details, quality details, and the source agency of the measurement.
Developed with Python 3.6 on Windows 10.
MIT License © Aaron Penne
Disclaimer: This project is not affiliated with NOAA or GHCN in any way.