download_canadian_stations 1.0

This is a utility to download the current list of active weather stations in Canada.

Currently, this downloads information about the Environment Canada weather stations and produces a CSV file with their details including

• Lat and Long
• Various IDs used to identify the station
• The station name
• A link to the historical records for this station

I wrote this utility to produce CSV files for use with Google's "My Maps" feature.

Installation and use

# Using pip
pip3 install download-canadian-stations

# If you want to pull from git, assuming you you have Python and pipenv installed
git clone https://github.com/timdaman/canadian-weather-station-downloader.git
cd canadian-weather-station-downloader
pipenv install
pipenv run ./download_stations.py

Why would I need a map of weather stations in Canada?

I do lots of wilderness travel. I sometimes like to analyze recent weather data for locations I will travel to in order to pack more efficiently and do better route planning. This is especially useful in the winter where I try to anticipate lake ice and snow conditions.

I find the way Environment Canada shows information about weather stations painful to use when trying to find the best station to draw data from. By overlaying the active stations on a map I can more easily determine the best choice. The url field then makes it easy to jump to the data.

Below is a list of maps I have created using output from this script

• Dec 2020 https://www.google.com/maps/d/u/0/edit?mid=1yIqZFfyOTgg509UNoe03iD_1ht8&usp=sharing

Notes

The code assumes yesterday's data is always available. Weather Canada does not produce a list of stations until the end of the day is PST so this code always uses PST time to identify what day it is.

Disclaimers

This is not an officially supported Google product.