Python package to pull PRISM weather data via web automation.

Project description

prism-pull

prism-pull is a python package made to pull data from PRISM Group using web automation. For those not familiar with PRISM Group, via the PRISM website:

The PRISM Group gathers weather observations from a wide range of monitoring networks, applies
sophisticated quality control measures, and develops spatial datasets to reveal short- and 
long-term weather patterns. The resulting datasets incorporate a variety of modeling techniques 
and are available at multiple spatial/temporal resolutions, covering the period from 1895 to 
the present.

The types of weather data consist of:

precipitaion totals
minimum temperatures
mean temperatures
maximum temperatures
minimum vapor pressure deficit
maximum vapor pressure deficit
mean dewpoint temperature
cloud transmittance
horizontal surface solar radiation data
sloped surface solar radiation data
clear sky solar radiation data

These data are available across a variety of timescales for each cell of a 4km by 4km or 800m by 800m grid covering the entire continential United States. This makes it an especially great source for locations where weather stations may not be operating.

Installation

Prerequisites:

pip
Google Chrome
Python3.10 or higher

Install with: pip install prism-pull

Usage

Remember to follow the PRISM Group terms of use for whatever your project may be. Usage is simple, and will be familiar to anyone who has used the PRISM GUI in the past. The package consists of one class and it's associated getter methods:

PrismSession
- get_30_year_monthly_normals
- get_30_year_daily_normals
- get_annual_values
- get_single_month_values
- get_monthly_values
- get_daily_values

Each getter method has two to three required arguments which are common to all of them. They are:

is_bulk_request:
- Set to True if you are providing a .csv for bulk location request. False otherise.
  - If set to True, you must provide a string csv_path.
  - If set to False, you must provide int/float latitude and longitude.
csv_path:
- A string path pointing to the .csv you want to use for a bulk request.
- Your .csv input should have three columns:
  - Column 1:
    - latitude: int/float
  - Column 2:
    - longitude: int/float
  - Column 3:
    - name: string fewer than 13 characters in length
latitude:
- An integer or floating point latitude coordinate.
longitude:
- An integer of floating point longitude coordinate.

There's also one optional arg common to all getter methods that I'll call out here:

download_dir:
- The directory where prism-pull will download the results of your PRISM queries.
- Default: your current working directory

PrismSession

Generate a new PrismSession:

import prism_pull.prism_session as pp

session = pp.PrismSession()

Your PrismSession object can be initialized with two optional arguments:

driver_wait:
- The time (in seconds) prism-pull web driver will wait before moving onto the next step. Consider increasing if you have poor download speeds.
- Default: 5 seconds

Here's an example of setting up a session with these arguments:

import prism_pull.prism_session as pp

session = pp.PrismSession(download_dir='absolute/path/to/download/to', driver_wait=10)

get_30_year_monthly_normals

Returns the average monthly conditions over the previous three decades for the provided latitude and longitude or csv_path. Here's an example usage showing a non-bulk request, and all the available weather inputs (precipitation, min_temp, etc.) set to their defaults:

import prism_pull.prism_session as pp

session = pp.PrismSession()

session.get_30_year_monthly_normals(
    is_bulk_request=False,
    latitude=40.9473,
    longitude=-112.2170,
    download_dir=CWD,
    precipitation=True,
    min_temp=False,
    mean_temp=True,
    max_temp=False,
    min_vpd=False,
    max_vpd=False,
    mean_dewpoint_temp=False,
    cloud_transmittance=False,
    solar_rad_horiz_sfc=False,
    solar_rad_sloped_sfc=False,
    solar_rad_clear_sky=False
)