Due Tuesday, August 3rd, at the start of class.
The purpose of this four-part project is to compare weather forecasts against actual weather observations. In this third part, you will make a new script to collect, reduce, and save the actual weather conditions as observed on top of the AO&SS building across Dayton Street.
It is time to collect our actual weather observations. They are available from the following website:
http://metobs.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/cache/aoss/tower/
Generally, you click through a few directories to get to the actual data files. The actual data file URL looks like this:
http://metobs.ssec.wisc.edu/pub/cache/aoss/tower/ascii/YYYY/MM/rig_tower.YYYY-MM-DD.ascii
Where YYYY is the four-digit year, MM is the two-digit month (e.g., 07 for July), and DD is the two-digit day of the month.
These files are large and contain too much data for our needs. You must write a script to download a data file and reduce the amount of data. We need only the temperature data, but we simply want the minimum and maximum temperatures for each time period. But how big should the time period be? The files contain records every 5 seconds, which is too much. Is one record per day enough? One record per hour? Something in between? That is up to you.
For today, your new script must:
Do the work yourself, consulting reasonable reference materials as needed; any reference material that gives you a complete or nearly complete solution to this problem or a similar one is not OK to use. Asking the instructors for help is OK, asking other students for help is not.
A printout of your script(s). Be sure to put your own name in the initial comment block of the code. Identifying your work is important, or you may not receive appropriate credit.