Lab Fellow Ben Roberts-Pierel highlights one of his favorite data exploration tools
Anybody who works with time series data will know there are myriad ways of acquiring, cleaning and analyzing those data. As the scientific community continues to work with these more temporally and spatially continuous datasets, streamlining workflows becomes likewise more important. There are numerous ways to do this but recently I have found the climata package (https://pypi.org/project/climata/) for Python a useful tool for pulling down data from the SNOTEL network. The package is setup to acquire time series data from a variety of climatological and hydrological sensor networks maintained by several government agencies. The tool can be run from the command line or embedded in a larger workflow. Although there are many such packages out there, this one has been easy to use, it is already setup to acquire domain specific data and has been (mostly) free of unexpected glitches. Anybody who is interested can check the github at: https://github.com/heigeo/climata

For those of you interested in the SNOTEL network and other applications of sensor network and remote sensing data, please consider attending the “Multi-sensor data integration for cryosphere and hydrosphere monitoring” session that I will be organizing at this year’s ESIP Summer Meeting. The session will feature presentations on applications of sensor network, remote sensing and modeled data by Dr. Jeff Deems of the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC), Dr. Eric Sproles of Montana State University and recipient of an ESIP Lab grant, Scott Oviatt from the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) and NOAA postdoc and ESIP Community Fellow, Dr. Yuhan Rao. The session will take place on Thursday, July 18th at 10:30 AM. Please contact me at robertsb@oregonstate.edu with any questions!
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