dwdparse

Parsers for DWD's open weather data.

The DWD (Deutscher Wetterdienst), as Germany's meteorological service, publishes a myriad of meteorological observations and calculations as part of their Open Data program.

dwdparse is a Python library for parsing the various formats that this data is published in, with no dependencies outside the standard library. It serves as the parsing backend for Bright Sky.

Our development effort focuses mainly on the data that is made available through Bright Sky, although we are very open to requests or contributions regarding other parsing targets. If you are looking for a more complete set of parsers - including for data from other weather agencies - and you don't mind the extra dependencies, take a look at the excellent wetterdienst.

Looking for something specific?

I just want to retrieve some weather data

You can use the free public Bright Sky instance!

I want to parse DWD weather files or contribute to dwdparse's source code

Read on. :)

Quickstart

You can use this package both as a stand-alone command-line tool or as a Python library.

Stand-alone DWD file parsing

1. Install the dwdparse package from PyPI:

   $ pip install dwdparse
   

2. Call dwdparse, providing your target file (or URL) as argument:

   $ dwdparse stundenwerte_TU_01766_akt.zip
   

This will output a newline-separated list of JSON records. Note that all numerical weather data is converted to SI units. If you wish to use DWD units, or if you need both DWD and WMO station IDs, check out the --units option and the example section with dwdparse --help.

Parsing DWD files from Python code

1. Install the dwdparse package from PyPI:

   $ pip install dwdparse
   

2. In Python, import one of the dwdparse parsers (or the get_parser utility function) from dwdparse, then call it's parse() method with the path of the file you would like to parse. This will return an iterable over weather records:

   from dwdparse import get_parser
   
   
   DWD_FILE_PATH = 'stundenwerte_TU_01766_akt.zip'
   
   parser_class = get_parser(DWD_FILE_PATH)
   parser = parser_class()
   
   for record in parser.parse(DWD_FILE_PATH):
       print(record)
   

Acknowledgements

dwdparse is developed as the main parsing core for Bright Sky. Bright Sky's development is boosted by the priceless guidance and support of the Open Knowledge Foundation's Prototype Fund program, and is generously funded by Germany's Federal Ministry of Education and Research. Obvious as it may be, it should be mentioned that none of this would be possible without the painstaking, never-ending effort of the Deutscher Wetterdienst.