The software can extract and organise recent Australian weather station data from the official Bureau of Meteorology website, creating a searchable dictionary of data subsets.
The Australian Bureau of Meteorology's website has a page that displays various weather data in a row-based plain text format. GetAuWeather downloads this page using the urllib module and extracts the data into a dictionary of dictionaries, which is a very convenient format for further processing. This software can be used for various tasks, such as dumping data into a database or .csv file, or displaying it on a screen.
GetAuWeather contains data for 747 weather stations throughout Australia, and each observation includes information about station name, station latitude and longitude, day of the month, hour of observation, visibility, cloud cover, wind direction and speed, temperature, relative humidity, rainfall amount and rain observation hour, and a single word description of the weather. Additionally, this program provides maximum and minimum temperature data over the previous 24 hours.
One thing to note is that if the file format of the Bureau's webpage changes, this program may break. However, the Bureau includes the date of the last format change in the page's output, and GetAuWeather checks whether this date has changed since it was written. If it has, the software will fail loudly.
To use GetAuWeather, you simply need to import the module and call its only function, getauweather. This function returns a dictionary whose keys are the names of Australian weather stations, and whose values are dictionaries containing each station's weather observations. With its simplicity and ease of integration into other programs, GetAuWeather is definitely worth considering for processing weather data in Python.
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