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Introducing pyAURN – a Python package for accessing UK air quality data

I realised recently that I’d never actually blogged about my pyAURN package – so it’s about time that I did.

When doing some freelance work on air quality a while back, I wanted an easy way to access UK air quality from the Automatic Urban and Rural Network (AURN). Unfortunately, there isn’t a nice API for accessing the data. Strangely, though, they do provide the data in a series of RData files for use by the openair R package. I wanted to use the data from Python though – but conveniently there is a Python package for reading RData files.

So, I put all these together into a simple Python package called pyAURN. It is strongly based upon openair, but is a lot more limited in functionality – it basically only covers importing the data, and doesn’t have many plotting or analysis functions.

Here’s an example of how to use it:

from pyaurn import importAURN, importMeta, timeAverage

# Download metadata of site IDs, names, locations etc
metadata = importMeta()

# Download 4 years of data for the Marylebone Road site
# (MY1 is the site ID for this site)
# Note: range(2016, 2022) will produce a list of six years: 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2021. 
# Alternatively define a list of years to use eg. [2016,2017,2018,2019,2020,2021]
data = importAURN("MY1", range(2016, 2022))

# Group the DataFrame by a frequency of monthly, and the statistic mean(). 
data_monthly = timeAverage(data,avg_time="month",statistic="mean")

I found this really useful for my air quality analysis work – and I hope you do too. The package is on PyPI, so you can run pip install pyaurn or view the project on Github.

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This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.

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Categorised as: Academic, GIS, Programming, Python, Remote Sensing