snotelpy

Open-source Python package for USDA SNOTEL snowpack data

snotelpy is a modern Python interface to USDA SNOTEL snowpack monitoring data via the NRCS AWDB REST API. It provides clean, xarray-based access to station observations at national scale — making it straightforward to pull multi-station, multi-variable time series without manually wrangling the API.

The package originated as a final project for ATOC 4815/5815 (Atmospheric Data Analysis) at CU Boulder and was co-developed with Eric Gosnell.

Key features:

  • REST API wrapper for the NRCS AWDB endpoint
  • xarray Dataset as the core data structure — supports labeled dimensions and native integration with MetPy, cartopy, and pandas
  • Station metadata lookup and filtering by state, elevation, or HUC
  • Published on PyPI, with full documentation and a Zenodo DOI for reproducibility

Links: GitHub · PyPI · Documentation

Stack: Python · xarray · requests · NumPy · REST APIs