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Lab Fellow Ben Roberts-Pierel highlights one of his favorite data exploration tools
 Many of us use Weather Underground daily to check the weather. For anybody unaware, Weather Underground incorporates data from a wide variety of sources, including hundreds of thousands of dispersed weather stations, precipitation and temperature gauges, many maintained by citizen scientists. In this context, I have been curious about accessing some of these data. Like many other readers I assume, I am frequently looking for streamlined ways of collecting environmental sensor/monitoring data in a programming interface. Following this thread, this month I will highlight another Python package that does just this. The WunderWeather package is designed to allow the user to interact directly with the Weather Underground API via a Python interface. This package provides a wrapper for the API and has functionality to easily access commonly used parameters such as temperature, precipitation and weather alerts. The package allows the user to get current conditions or historical data from myriad sources and easily incorporate into app development, broader Python modules or other workflows. The project is described at: https://pypi.org/project/WunderWeather/#id7 where some limited examples are provided. The library relies on the requests package and was built in Python 3.5, so it is not back compatible with 2.7.
In case people are unfamiliar with the Weather Underground model or are interested in joining the sensor network that is available here: https://www.wunderground.com/pws/overview
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