NOAA Water Temperature CA

This repository downloads recent NOAA coastal water temperature observations for a small set of California stations and stores them as CSV files.

What this repo contains

• main.py — script that requests water temperature data from the NOAA Tides & Currents API and writes one CSV per station.
• stations.csv — list of California stations used by the script.
• data/ — downloaded station-level water temperature files.
• pyproject.toml — minimal Python project configuration and dependencies.

Data source

The data comes from the NOAA Tides & Currents API using the water_temperature product.

The script requests:

• station observations
• metric units
• local station time (lst_ldt)
• CSV output format

Repository structure

.
├── data/
│   ├── water_temperature-<StationName>-<begin_date>-<end_date>.csv
├── main.py
├── stations.csv
├── pyproject.toml
└── README.md

Input file

stations.csv

List of stations to query.

column	description
id	NOAA station ID
name	human-readable station name

Example:

id,name
9410170,San Diego
9410230,La Jolla

Output data

The script writes one CSV file per station into data/.

Filename pattern:

data/water_temperature-<StationName>-<begin_date>-<end_date>.csv

Example:

data/water_temperature-San Diego-20260619-20260720.csv

Output columns

column	description
StationID	NOAA station ID
StationName	station name from stations.csv
Date_Time	observation timestamp in local station time
Water_Temperature	water temperature in degrees Celsius
X	NOAA quality/control flag field from the API output
N	NOAA quality/control flag field from the API output
R	NOAA quality/control flag field from the API output

Minimal metadata dictionary

{
    "StationID": "NOAA station identifier",
    "StationName": "Human-readable station name",
    "Date_Time": "Observation timestamp in local station time (lst_ldt)",
    "Water_Temperature": "Observed water temperature in degrees Celsius",
    "X": "NOAA flag column carried through from source data",
    "N": "NOAA flag column carried through from source data",
    "R": "NOAA flag column carried through from source data",
}

How it works

1. Read the station list from stations.csv
2. Request water temperature data for each station
3. Normalize column names
4. Add StationID and StationName
5. Save one CSV file per station under data/

Running the script

Install dependencies and run:

python main.py

Notes

• The date range is currently hard-coded in main.py.
• Existing files are not overwritten unless you confirm it interactively.
• Some stations may return no data for the selected date range.