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Scripts for finding out the weather in a particular zip code on a particular day (or a set of dates). You can also find weather stations near a zip code, and vice-versa.

From Bad Weather: Getting weather data by zip and date:

Some brief ground clearing before we begin. Weather data come from weather stations, which can belong to any of the five or more 'networks,' each of which collect somewhat different data, sometimes label the same data differently, and have different reporting protocols. The only geographic information that typically comes with weather stations is their latitude and longitude. By “weather”, we may mean temperature, rain, wind, snow, etc. and we may want data on these for every second, minute, hour, day, month etc. It is good to keep in mind that not all weather stations report data for all units of time, and there can be a fair bit of missing data. Getting data at coarse time units like day, month, etc. typically involves making some decisions about what particular statistic is the most useful. So for instance, you may want, minimum and maximum (for daily temperature), or totals (for rainfall and snow). With that primer, let’s begin.

We begin with what not to do. Do not use the NOAA web service. The API provides a straightforward way to get 'weather' data for a particular zip for a particular month. Except, the requests often return nothing. It isn't clear why. The documentation doesn't say whether the search for the closest weather station is limited to X kilometers because without that, one should have data for all zip codes and all dates. Nor does the API bother to return how far the weather station is from which it got the data, though one can get that post hoc using Google Geocoding API. However, given the possibility that the backend for the API would improve over time, here's a script for getting the daily weather data, and hourly precipitation data.

On to what can be done. The 'web service' that you can use is Farmer's Almanac's. Sleuthing using scripts that we discuss later reveal that The Almanac reports data from the NWS-USAF-NAVY stations (ftp link to the data file. And it appears to have data for most times though no information is provided on the weather station from which it got the data and the distance to the zip code.

If you intend to look for data from GHCND, COOP or ASOS, there are two kinds of crosswalks that you can create – one that goes from zip codes to weather stations, and one that goes from weather stations to zip codes. I assume that we don’t have access to shape files (for census zip codes), and that postal zip codes encompass a geographic region. To create a weather station to zip code crosswalk, web service such as Geonames or Google Geocoding API can be used. If the station lat,./long. is in the zip code, the distance comes up as zero. Otherwise the distance is calculated as distance from the “centroid” of the zip code (see geonames script that finds 5 nearest zips for each weather station). For creating a zip code to weather station crosswalk, we get centroids of each zip using a web service such as Google (or use already provided centroids from free zip databases). And then find the 'nearest' weather stations by calculating distances to each of the weather stations. For a given set of zip codes, you can get a list of closest weather stations (you can choose to get n closest stations, or say all weather stations within x kilometers radius, and/or choose to get stations from particular network(s)) using the following script. The output lists for each zip code weather stations arranged by proximity. The task of getting weather data from the closest station is simple thereon – get data (on a particular set of columns of your choice) from the closest weather station from which the data are available. You can do that for a particular zip code and date (and date range) combination using the following script.

1. Find nearest zip codes given a list of weather stations (COOP and GHCND) via geonames: Data and scripts

2. Find nearest weather stations given a list of zip codes: Data and scripts

3. Get data from nearest weather station given a list of zip codes and date or range of dates: Script

4. Multi-threaded version of 3. Get data from nearest weather station given a list of zip codes and date or range of dates: Script

5. Get data from nearest weather station given a list of zip codes and date using the NOAA webservice: Script

Suriyan Laohaprapanon and Gaurav Sood

Scripts are released under the MIT License.