I wrote a bash while loop to download this data:

Again, I digress, back to downloading data.

It’s also interesting to note that the station ID is different from the Climate ID even though Environment Canada defines “the climate ID is a 7 digit number assigned by the Meteorological Service of Canada to a site where official weather observations are taken, and serves as a permanent, unique identifier.” Perhaps there was a thought leader who was suffering from past trauma where a client’s definition of a “permanent unique identifier” didn’t match up with a relational databases’ definition of a unique identifier, and insisted on creating a lookup table for these different IDs. Furthermore, the month and day values didn’t seem to affect anything – since this was annual data, only the year was used. The website gave me an option to change the range of data to download however if you squint enough, the above URL looks like an API. Upon clicking the Download Data button, my web browser was redirected to: On the right hand side of that page, there was an option to download the data as CSV. I ended up on Environment Canada’s historic data search page, and ended up with a table of daily weather recorded at Victoria International Airport, climate ID 1018621 (which is closer to Sidney BC, but I digress). Before I knew it, rather than simply look up how many days it’s been since it last rained (42 and counting!), I was plotting cumulative annual rainfall. I couldn’t remember the last time it had rained, which got me looking at historical weather data. It’s been a really dry summer here in Victoria BC (and the rest of the province).

Python panda cdf files