download the data

  1. Go to the Faculty of Agriculture's weather station.
  2. Click on משיכת נתונים and download data for 1 September to 28 February, with a 24h interval. Call it data-sep2020-feb2021. You can download an example file here.
  3. Open the .csv file with Excel, see how it looks like

import packages

We need to import this data into python. First we import useful packages. Type (don't copy and paste) the following lines in the code cell below:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.set(style="ticks", font_scale=1.5)
# the following lets us use dates as xlim
from pandas.plotting import register_matplotlib_converters
register_matplotlib_converters()

import data with pandas

Import data from csv and put it in a pandas dataframe (a table). Make line 5 the header (column names)

df = pd.read_csv("data-sep2020-feb2021.csv", header=[4], encoding = "ISO-8859-1")
df

rename columns

rename the columns to:
date, tmax, tmin, wind, rain24h, rain_cumulative

df.columns = ['date', 'tmax', 'tmin', 'wind', 'rain24h', 'rain_cumulative']
df

a first plot!

plot the minimum temperature:

plt.plot(df['tmin'])

how to deal with dates

We want the dates to appear on the horizontal axis.
Interpret 'date' column as a pandas datetime, see how it looks different from before
before: 01/09/20
after: 2020-09-01

df['date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['date'], dayfirst=True)
df

date as dataframe index

Make 'date' the dataframe's index

df = df.set_index('date')
df

plot again, now with dates

Plot minimum temperature, now we have dates on the horizontal axis

plt.plot(df['tmin'])

we're getting there! the graph could look better

Let's make the graph look better: labels, title, slanted dates, etc

%matplotlib notebook
# creates figure (the canvas) and the axis (rectangle where the plot sits)
fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, figsize=(10,7))
# two line plots
ax.plot(df['tmin'], color="red", label="Temp (min)")
ax.plot(df['tmax'], color="blue", label="Temp (max)")
# axes labels and figure title
ax.set_xlabel('date')
ax.set_ylabel('temperature (°C)')
ax.set_title('maximum and minimum temperatures')
# some ticks adjustments
ax.set_yticks([10,15,20,25])  # we can choose where to put ticks
ax.grid(axis='y')         # makes horizontal lines
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()  # makes slated dates
# legend
ax.legend(loc='upper right')
# save png figure
plt.savefig("temp_max_min.png")

make the following figure

Use the following function to plot bars for daily rainfall

ax.bar(x_array, y_array)

Can you write yourself some lines of code that calculate the cumulative rainfall from the daily rainfall?

  • double click this markdown cell to reveal the code I used to produce the figure. Don't do this right away, try to go as far as you can!

make another figure

In order to choose just a part of the time series, you can use the following:

start_date = '2021-01-01'
end_date = '2021-01-31'
january = df[start_date:end_date]

  • double click this markdown cell to reveal the code I used to produce the figure. Don't do this right away, try to go as far as you can!

one last figure for today

Use the following code to create histograms with user-defined bins:

b = np.arange(0, 56, 5)  # bins from 0 to 55, width = 5
ax.hist(df['wind'], bins=b, density=True)

Play with the bins, see what happens. What does density=True do?

  • double click this markdown cell to reveal the code I used to produce the figure. Don't do this right away, try to go as far as you can!

homework

Go back to the weather station website, download one year of data from 01.01.2020 to 31.12.2020 (24h data).
Make the following graph:

  • daily tmax and tmin
  • smoothed data for tmax and tmin

In order to smooth the data with a 30 day window, use the following function:
df['tmin'].rolling(30, center=True).mean()
This means that you will take the mean of 30 days, and put the result in the center of this 30-day window.

Play with this function, see what you can do with it. What happens when you change the size of the window? Why is the smoothed data shorter than the original data? See the documentation for rolling to find more options.

  • double click this markdown cell to reveal the code I used to produce the figure. Don't do this right away, try to go as far as you can!