# Lesson 3. Resample or Summarize Time Series Data in Python With Pandas - Hourly to Daily Summary

This lesson supports the additional homework assignment question for graduate students to create a subsetted and aggregated plot.

## Learning Objectives

After completing this tutorial, you will be able to:

• Resample times series data from hourly to daily in Pandas

### Things You’ll Need To Complete This Lesson

You need Python and Jupyter notebooks to complete this tutorial. Also you should have an earth-analytics directory setup on your computer with a /data directory with it.

Often you need to summarize or aggregate time series data by a new time period. For instance you may want to summarize hourly data to provide a daily maximum value. This process of changing the time period that data are summarized for is often called resampling. And lucky for you there is a nice resample() method that you can use with pandas dataframes witha datetime index!

You will use the same COOP precipitation data that you used in the previous lesson. However, before using the data, there are consider a few things:

1. The data were collected over several decades and the data were not always collected consistently
2. The data are not cleaned. You will find heading names that may not be meaningful, and other issues with the data that need to be explored

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import os
plt.ion()

# set default figure parameters
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (8, 8)
# prettier plotting with seaborn
import seaborn as sns;
sns.set(font_scale=1.5)
sns.set_style("whitegrid")

# set working dir and import earthpy
import earthpy as et
os.chdir(os.path.join(et.io.HOME, 'earth-analytics'))


## Import Precipitation Data

You will use the 805333-precip-daily-1948-2013.csv dataset in this lesson. This dataset contains the precipitation values collected daily from the COOP station 050843 in Boulder, CO for 1 January 2003 through 31 December 2013. These data are hourly data. This means that there are sometimes multiple values collected for each day if it happened to rain throughout the day.

The structure of the data is similar to what you saw in previous lessons. The HPCP column contains the total precipitation given in inches, recorded for the hour ending at the time specified by DATE. There is a designated missing data value of 999.99. Note that if there is no data in a particular hour, then no value is recorded.

The metadata for this file is located in your week2 directory: PRECIP_HLY_documentation.pdf file that can be downloaded along with the data. (Note, as of Sept. 2016, there is a mismatch in the data downloaded and the documentation. The differences are in the units and missing data value: inches/999.99 (standard) or millimeters/25399.75 (metric)).

### No Data Values

Be sure to explore the data closely. If there are no data values in the data, adjust your data import code above to account for no data values. Then determine how many no data values you have in your dataset.

Your goal is to create a total daily precipitation value for each day. To begin, import the data into Python and then view the first few rows, and what data type each column contains. When you import, be sure to specify the:

• no data values
• date column
• the date index column
# open the data
na_values=[999.99],
parse_dates=['DATE'],
index_col = 'DATE')

STATIONSTATION_NAMEELEVATIONLATITUDELONGITUDEHPCPMeasurement FlagQuality Flag
DATE
2003-01-01 01:00:00COOP:050843BOULDER 2 CO US1650.540.03389-105.281110.0g
2003-02-01 01:00:00COOP:050843BOULDER 2 CO US1650.540.03389-105.281110.0g
2003-02-02 19:00:00COOP:050843BOULDER 2 CO US1650.540.03389-105.281110.2
2003-02-02 22:00:00COOP:050843BOULDER 2 CO US1650.540.03389-105.281110.1
2003-02-03 02:00:00COOP:050843BOULDER 2 CO US1650.540.03389-105.281110.1

View the data structure.

precip_boulder.dtypes

STATION              object
STATION_NAME         object
ELEVATION           float64
LATITUDE            float64
LONGITUDE           float64
HPCP                float64
Measurement Flag     object
Quality Flag         object
dtype: object


## Plot Precipitation Data

Next plot the data. Notice that the data often have multiple records for a single day. However you are interested in summarizing the data for each day.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize = (10,8))
ax.scatter(precip_boulder.index,
precip_boulder["HPCP"],
color = 'purple')
ax.set(xlabel='Date', ylabel='Precipitation (Inches)',
title="Hourly Precipitation - Boulder Station\n 1948-2013");


## Resample Hourly Data to Daily Data

For your research project, you only need daily summary values. To aggregate or temporal resample the data for a time period, you can create a new object called in the dataset called day. You will take all of the values for each day and summarize them. In this case you want total daily rainfall - so you will use the resample() and .sum() function. resample() is a method in pandas that can be used to summarize data by date or time.

The .sum() method will add up all values for each resampling period (eg for each day) to provide a summary output value for that period.

If you do not set the DATE column as the index, your code will look like this:

pandas_data_fram_name.resample('D', on = 'DATE').sum()

If you do however, you do not need the on= argument.

pandas_data_fram_name.resample('D').sum()

The on argument of the resample function is used to specify the column that will be used to summarized. This column need to be in the format datetime. Notice that either method will return a new DataFrame with the dates as the index.

The 'D' specifies that you will aggregate by day.

**Data Tip:** You can also resample using the syntax below. Here you first set the date to the index of the dataframe. By doing this, you do not need to specify the on argument. python # you don't need to set the index here manually if you've already done it when you import the data precip_boulder2 = precip_boulder.set_index('DATE') daily_sum_precip2 = precip_boulder2.resample('D').sum() 
# resample the data
precip_boulder_daily = precip_boulder.resample('D').sum()


Once you have resampled the data, look at it. Each HPCP value now represents a daily total or sum of all precipitation measured that day. Notice in the output below that your DATE field no longer contains time stamps. Also notice that you have only one summary value or row per day.

precip_boulder_daily.head()

ELEVATIONLATITUDELONGITUDEHPCP
DATE
2003-01-011650.540.03389-105.281110.0
2003-01-020.00.000000.000000.0
2003-01-030.00.000000.000000.0
2003-01-040.00.000000.000000.0
2003-01-050.00.000000.000000.0
# plot the data
fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize = (8,8))
ax.scatter(precip_boulder_daily.index,
precip_boulder_daily['HPCP'],
color = 'purple')
ax.set(xlabel='Date',
ylabel='Precipitation (Inches)',
title="Daily Precipitation - Boulder Station\n 1983-2013");