How to use the NOAA API to query past weather data for a given set of coordinates

user1481941 picture user1481941 · Sep 16, 2013 · Viewed 13.2k times · Source

I am trying to retrieve past NOAA data using latitudinal and longitudinal coordinates. I am interested both in historical time series and annual summaries for variables such as temperature, wind speed, cloud fraction, and precipitation.

EX: 2008-02-20 13:00 in (25.033972, 121.564493)

I hope to automate a process that achieves this for 900,000+ locations. Any ideas? Ideally this script would be written in R or Python.

Answer

Wayne Werner picture Wayne Werner · Nov 9, 2013
  1. Figure out the endpoint/dataset that contains the information you want (or multiple ones)
  2. Convert lat/long into zip code
  3. Find the correct station for the zip code here
  4. For each endpoint, pull data for each location.
  5. ???
  6. Profit???