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This API is enables access to two sources of weather data. One is the MARS (Meteorological Archival and Retrieval System) weather data archive of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF), the other is the OpenWeatherMap platform (OWM).
The ECMWF archive contains petabytes of operational and research data - meaning it has both historical data and active forecast computations. It can be accessed directly through a RESTful and Python API. Details can be found in its documentation.
The OWM platform offers free access to a limited amount of daily weather forecasts. It is also possible to access historic data for a price. Details can be found in their documentation.
See details on the Installation page.
Usage of the library for downloading ECMWF can be split into two main operations:
1 - Data download: The data first needs to be requested from the MARS archive. The request has a number of parameters which specify the data range to download. A fixed set of weather features is obtained. After download data is stored to disk in the GRIB format typically used in meteorology.
2 - Data extraction: GRIB files are binary and efficient for storage but for use the data they encode needs to be extracted. The library contains tools for iterating over the contained data points and extracting them for use.
Using the library to download OWM data is a bit simpler. For details inspect the example below.
See an example of use in example.py.