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# TCO data

This website serves as a starting point for accessing data from the [Tropical Cloud Observations Group](https://mpimet.mpg.de/en/research/department-climate-physics/tropical-cloud-observations) at the Max-Planck-Institut für Meteorologie in Hamburg.
At this place, we cover data from our permanent observation site, the Barbados Cloud Observatory (BCO), as well as data acquired during various field campaigns.


## using the data

```{code-cell} python
:tags: [remove-cell]
import warnings
warnings.filterwarnings('ignore')
```

We generally make data available through an [intake](https://intake.readthedocs.io) catalog, in a way which enables anyone to open our datasets directly (i.e. without prior subsetting and downloading).
To get a quick glimpse of how this may look like, here's a Python example showing the surface temperature at the BCO over the last 30 days:

```{code-cell} python
from datetime import datetime, timedelta
import intake

cat = intake.open_catalog("https://tcodata.mpimet.mpg.de/catalog.yaml")
wxt = cat.BCO.surfacemet_wxt_v1.to_dask()
wxt["T"].sel(time=slice(datetime.now() - timedelta(days=30), datetime.now())).plot(figsize=(12, 4));
```

So in general, the steps to access the data are:
* open the tcodata catalog
* select and get a dataset
* do something with the dataset

Please have a look at the description of the individual instruments and datasets to find out which data is available in our catalog.

## requirements

For the code to actually work on your machine, a few Python packages are required, which you could install e.g. using `pip`:

```
python -m pip install 'intake<2' requests aiohttp intake-xarray
```

This should be enough to access our datasets, but you might of course want to use further packages for data processing and presentation.
In this documentation, we use e.g. `matplotlib` to create example plots.

:::{dropdown} Full requirements for tcodata documentation.
For reference, here's the complete list of requirements to build the entire tcodata documentation including data access and plots:

```{literalinclude} pyproject.toml
```
:::

## more information

* [BCO Website](https://barbados.mpimet.mpg.de/)
* [Observations WIKI](https://wiki.mpimet.mpg.de/doku.php?id=observations:bco:start)
* <a href="viewer/index.html">TCO Viewer (experimental JavaScript viewer)</a>