SynopticPy 2026.6.0

Retrieve mesonet weather data as Polars DataFrames from Synoptic's Weather API.

Synoptic API for Python

📘 Documentation | 💬 Discussions | 🚑 Issues

Synoptic's Weather API provides real-time and historical surface-based weather and environmental observations for thousands of mesonet stations, and the open-access data is free. More data and enhanced services may be purchased (from Synoptic, not me).

I'm a Synoptic user. I wrote this package to conveniently request data from Synoptic in a Pythonic way and convert its returned JSON to a Polars DataFrame.

from datetime import timedelta
from synoptic import TimeSeries

df = TimeSeries(
    stid="wbb",
    recent=timedelta(minutes=30)
).df()

I'm sharing this package to improve my skills with Polars and gain more experience in building and maintaining open-source Python packages. If you came across this package, I hope you find it valuable.

Best of Luck 🍀
-Brian

🐍 Install

uv add SynopticPy

pip install SynopticPy

conda install -c conda-forge synopticpy

Configure Token

[!IMPORTANT]

🎟️ To use SynopticPy you need a Synoptic API token.

There are three ways you can configure your Synoptic API token:

1. Set an environment variable SYNOPTIC_TOKEN with your token. For example, in bash:

   export SYNOPTIC_TOKEN="yourTokenHere123456789"
   

2. Create a file ~/.config/SynopticPy/config.toml with the following

   token = "yourTokenHere123456789"
   

3. Pass your token whenever you use one of SynopticPy's classes.

   TimeSeries(
       stid="wbb",
       recent=30,
       token="yourTokenHere123456789"
   )
   

How to Cite and Acknowledge

If SynopticPy played an important role in your work, please tell me about it! Also, consider including a citation or acknowledgement in your article or product.

Suggested Citation

Blaylock, B. K. (YEAR). SynopticPy: Synoptic API for Python (Version 20??.?.?) [Computer software]. https://github.com/blaylockbk/SynopticPy

Suggested Acknowledgment

A portion of this work used code generously provided by Brian Blaylock's SynopticPy Python package (https://github.com/blaylockbk/SynopticPy)

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[!TIP]

📈 See also my SynopticPy Web App which lets you plot station data in your browser powered by pyscript!