Thursday, August 6, 2015

NOAA's data, get it with this script.

NOAA's weather data, as I previously mentioned, is a bit difficult. It seems to have no coherent format, and it is obviously a dump from a database. In order to try to make it just a bit better, I used a bash script to download, and format the data:

temperature.sh

The script downloads the raw files to: ./temperature/downloads, and then tries to create CSV files in ./temperature/data/extracted

I've just started looking at the data, but wow... soft sciences.
The most jarring thing is that you will have data for a weather station given for the year. I'm sure that the internal database has monthly information because the year is given with an offset of missing months. So, the number 823b means that the temperature was 8.23 degrees C with 2 months missing. The letter denotes how many months are missing.

I will revisit this data when I feel that I can handle drudging through it.

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