Get Access to historical weather data

[Andrerg01]

A resource here. Need to know how to access it programmatically (if at all). If not possible, get a big chunk of data and snip the parts we actually need.

[Andrerg01]

Another project to read Level III NexRad data https://github.com/jjhelmus/nexrad_level3. May be of help

[Andrerg01]

MetPy can also read those Level III files, apparently

[Andrerg01]

Ok, think I made good progress... We can get a token here, and have access to the API. I figured out how to get some precipitation data and whatnot, radar data would be perfect. I'll work on it and push in a new branch soon

[Andrerg01]

Made a wiki on the basic usage of the NOAA Weather Dataset API. My current plan:

• Learn to read and interpret Level II Radar data (should include 3D reflectivity and radial speed information)
• Filter out which weather stations are on the flights paths we care about (need to understand the range of the stations)
• Filter out out-of-date stations
• Filter out stations that do not contain relevant data
• Get/Interpolate weather data for each section of all the flights based on data from nearby stations at the correct time.
  • Since stations only seem to read radial velocity information, we'd need at least 3 stations with information about the same coordinates to really know the wind velocity (in 3D) at that location. Need to account for uncertainty, so some bayesian stuff might be involved.
• Then what? With this we'd get weather info for all the flights, should we still calculate the weather influence score (#22) for hypothetical fuel-minimizing (#105) flights and see how much "weather" is enough to cause the deviation? Maybe.... Lots to be done.

[Andrerg01]

As far as I could work out, I can't get access to radar NEXRAD data through the API. At least I couldn't get it to work. I can successfully get daily weather data for stations, so we might just need to use that. A higher time resolution would be better, but doesn't seem possible yet.

[Andrerg01]

Great progress on getting NEXRAD data for any time of day ever! Made a wiki

[Andrerg01]

Pretty much done here. Waiting for the meeting to confer and close the issue.

[Andrerg01]

Closing!