Global Airport Observations (ASOS/AWOS)

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Historical and near-real-time METAR observations from global airports. Observation data is retrieved from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet, maintained by Iowa State University, which archives and distributes ASOS data.

Data

Each file contains the full set of decoded METAR fields for all global ASOS/AWOS stations in a given year, including temperature, dewpoint, precipitation, wind, visibility, cloud cover, pressure, and present-weather codes. Latitude and longitude columns are included as a GeoParquet geometry, enabling spatial queries and direct use with geospatial tools.

The dataset is partitioned by year using Hive-style paths (year={YYYY}/data.parquet). This allows efficient access to specific time ranges without scanning the entire archive.

Processing

Observations are stored as received from the Iowa Environmental Mesonet with no resampling, interpolation, or quality-control filtering applied. The raw METAR reports are decoded into tabular columns and written to GeoParquet with Snappy compression. Updates are ingested hourly as new reports become available.

Storage

Storage for this dataset is generously provided by Source Cooperative, a Radiant Earth initiative.

import pyarrow.parquet as pq
import pyarrow.fs as fs

s3 = fs.S3FileSystem(region="us-east-2", anonymous=True)
dataset = pq.ParquetDataset(
    "data.source.coop/dynamical/asos-parquet/",
    filesystem=s3,
)
table = dataset.read()
df = table.to_pandas()

Query

Run Query