A simple system showing how to create a data pipeline from NOAA

• Live site located at: 4casttruth.win
• Feel free to pull the parquet files and use in your own data analysis (python is a good choice to do this with)

Example of using the UI:

Where data comes from:

• Info on where the data used to generate the parquet files comes from:
  • Observations: https://w1.weather.gov/xml/current_obs/all_xml.zip
  • Forecasts (Multiple Point Un-summarized Data): https://graphical.weather.gov/xml/rest.php
• These xml data files are updated once an hour by NOAA, so to be respectful of their services we run our data pulling process once an hour as well

How the system works:

• daemon:
  • Background process to pull down data from NOAA and transform it into flatted parquet files. These files are then pushed to the parquet_file_service via the REST endpoint POST http://localhost:9100/file (via multipart form)
• parquet_file_service:
  • A REST API that takes in the parquet files and allows downloading of them from a bones browser UI that is also hosted by the api.
• ui:
  • Holds the browser UI that's just an index.html and main.js file. It uses @duckdb/duckdb-wasm to allow the end user to query directly against the download parquet files
  • It uses https://bulma.io/ for css styling

Why build a data pipeline like this:

• No remote DB needed, only a dumb file server, makes this cheap to run
• Faster and more flexible querying ability provided to the end user, allowing them to find unique insights that the original system design may not be looking to find
• Each piece is a 'simple' logical item, allowing for scalability for however large the usage is on the service
• Would NOT recommend using this approach if the data being tracked needs to be updated in the parquet files and stored as a relational model, only really works if the data model can be snapshots and immutable over time

Data Pipeline Process (arrows in direction of who initiates the talking):

[noaa api] <- [daemon] -> parquet files -> [parquet_file_service] <- parquet files <- [browser duck_db]

How to use:

• Daemon
• Parquet_file_service
• Browser