Command Line Interface¶
riweather uses a small database to keep track of the weather stations that exist in
NOAA’s Integrated Surface Database (ISD),
as well as the years for which there is data at each station. The command line
interface lets you rebuild this database from scratch, straight from sources present
on the ISD server itself.
It’s a good idea to do this periodically because NOAA updates the ISD regularly, and
the database in riweather will eventually get out of date as new years and/or weather
stations are added.
Completely rebuilding the database requires two steps. First, riweather must
download a few files from the Internet. These files are:
isd-history.csv, containing information about each weather station, including ID, name, elevation, and location.isd-inventory.csv, which records the number of weather observations per station and per year.cb_2020_us_county_500k.zipandcb_2020_us_zcta520_500k.zip, which are US Census shapefiles describing the boundaries of counties and Zip Code Tabulation Areas (ZCTAs), respectively, in the United States.
These files are downloaded to a directory on your computer that you specify when you
run riweather download-metadata. The second step is to provide this same directory
to riweather rebuild-db. The files will be read and assembled into a SQLite database,
also located on your computer, which the package can then use to fetch station
information and the like.
Example¶
To rebuild the database, first run
This will create a directory named tmp_riweather_data and download the files into it.
Next, run
This could take around 10 minutes to run, so please be patient. Once it finishes,
you can delete the tmp_riweather_data folder if you’d like – those files are no
longer needed at this point.
CLI Reference¶
riweather¶
Riweather makes grabbing weather data easier.
Usage:
Options:
riweather download-metadata¶
Download weather station and US geography metadata.
Pulls files from the Internet that are necessary to (re)build the riweather metadata database.
Usage:
Options:
-d, --dst DIRECTORY Directory where the data will be stored. [required]
--help Show this message and exit.
riweather rebuild-db¶
Drop and recreate all tables in the metadata database.
Usage:
Options: