I'm heartened to see people utilizing Weather Underground as a
source of real-time weather data.
I've had good luck working with Weather Underground data for several
years, and find its coverage and data availability rather
astonishing: over 16,000 personal weather stations (mostly US), and
links to 34,000 official weather stations around the world (26,000
US, 6,000 international). If anyone's interested in real-time data
at the local level, this would be a prime source to check.
However, I do want to mention some cautions in using WUnderground
data. None of these are "showstoppers" but they will require work in
data processing:
1. data are in standard METAR format
2. period of record may not go beyond the last 2-3 years.
3. occasional data gaps
4. (the biggie) no cloud cover data to estimate solar radiation
(my solution has been to "borrow" cloud cover data from the nearest
official weather station)
As far as downloading the data, I've been using python scripts
written by Ery Djunaedy of the IDL at Univ. of Idaho building on
previously posted work
at
http://flowingdata.com/2007/07/09/grabbing-weather-underground-data-with-beautifulsoup/
. The scripts have worked like a charm, allowing me to download all
available data for a site at one shot.
Joe
Joe Huang
White Box Technologies, Inc.
346 Rheem Blvd., Suite 108D
Moraga CA 94556
yjhuang@...
http://weather.whiteboxtechnologies.com for simulation-ready weather data
(o) (925)388-0265
(c) (510)928-2683
"building energy simulations at your fingertips"
On 8/7/2014 7:51 AM, Jamie Bull
jamiebull1@...
[EnergyPlus_Support] wrote:
And this Python snippet since
downloading a day at a time is quite a headache.