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.
If you found this post useful, please consider buying me a coffee.
This post originally appeared on Robin's Blog.
Categorised as: Academic, GIS, Programming, Python, Remote Sensing
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