If you go to this website: https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/Data_request.cgi?byr=2010&bmo=5&bdy=26&bhr=12&eyr=2010&emo=5&edy=27&ehr=15&shour=All Times&ltype=All Levels&wunits=Knots&access=WMO Station Identifier

Type "72632" into the box, and change "Format" to "NetCDF format (binary)", and then click "Continue Data Access", a NetCDF file is downloaded to your computer.

If I use the Chrome developer tools to track network activity after clicking this button, I can see the the "Request URL" which leads to this file being downloaded is: https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/GetRaobs.cgi?shour=All Times&ltype=All Levels&wunits=Knots&bdate=2010052612&edate=2010052715&access=WMO Station Identifier&view=NO&StationIDs=72632&osort=Station Series Sort&oformat=NetCDF format (Binary)

If you copy and paste that URL into a web browser, the file is downloaded.

What I want to do is use Python to take a URL formatted like the one above, and retrieve the associated NetCDF file.

I've had luck in the past doing something like

url = 'https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/GetRaobs.cgi?shour=All Times&ltype=All Levels&wunits=Knots&bdate=2010052612&edate=2010052715&access=WMO Station Identifier&view=NO&StationIDs=72632&osort=Station Series Sort&oformat=NetCDF format (Binary)'
da  = xr.open_dataset(url)

But that doesn't work in this case:

OSError: [Errno -75] NetCDF: Malformed or unexpected Constraint: b'https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/GetRaobs.cgi?shour=All Times&ltype=All Levels&wunits=Knots&bdate=2010052612&edate=2010052715&access=WMO Station Identifier&view=NO&StationIDs=72632&osort=Station Series Sort&oformat=NetCDF format (Binary)'

I've also tried to wget the URL, but that just downloads a ".cgi" file which I don't think is useful.

Thanks for any help!

CodePudding user response：

You could use my package nctoolkit to download the file and then export to xarray. This will save the file to a temporary directory, but will remove it once the session is done.

import nctoolkit as nc
import xarray as xr
ds = nc.open_url("https://ruc.noaa.gov/raobs/GetRaobs.cgi?shour=All Times&ltype=All Levels&wunits=Knots&bdate=2010052612&edate=2010052715&access=WMO Station Identifier&view=NO&StationIDs=72632&osort=Station Series Sort&oformat=NetCDF format (Binary)")
ds_xr = ds.to_xarray()