Processing Data from the NCAR Mesa Lab Weather Station#

There is a weather station located at the Mesa Lab, situated along the Foothills of the Rockies in Boulder, Colorado!

By the end of this post, you will be able to plot an interactive visualization of the weather data collected at the Mesa Lab, as shown below!

mesa_lab_gif

Here is a picture of the lab!

ncar-mesa-lab

The Data#

This station collects data every 10 minutes, is publicly available from this site, with live plots viewable here

For this example, we downloaded a month’s worth of daily data from December 2016. You can access the FTP server using this this link, pulling data from the /mesa directory. You will also need to unzip the files.

Imports#

In this example, we utilize xarray and pandas for data cleaning, and hvplot/holoviews for visualization!

import holoviews as hv
import hvplot
import hvplot.xarray
import pandas as pd
import xarray as xr
from metpy.units import units

hv.extension('bokeh')