Brian Blaylock
October 10, 2018

How to use rclone to access GOES16, HRRR, and NEXRAD on Amazon AWS

As part of NOAA's Big Data Project, Amazon makes available NEXRAD, GOES, HRRR, and other data publicly available via Amazon Web Services (AWS). You can use rclone to access this data and download for your use. (You can even use rclone to access personal OneDrive, Google Drive, Box, and other types of cloud storage.)

1. Download and install rclone

Rclone can be installed on any platform.

https://rclone.org/

It can also be easily installed via conda

conda install -c conda-forge rclone

2. Configure rclone to access Amazon S3

After rclone has been downloaded and installed, configure a remote by typing rclone config. Then type n for new remote.

Name the remote anything you like, but use a name that will remind you it accesses the public Amazon S3 buckets. I named mine publicAWS.

Set Type of Storage as Amazon S3 Compliant Storage Providers which is option 4 for me.

Set Storage Provider as Amazon Web Services S3 which is option 1 for me.

Leave everything else blank (push enter for the remaining prompts).

The prompt will ask you if something like following is correct:

[publicAWS]
type = s3
provider = AWS
env_auth =
access_key_id =
secret_access_key =
region =
endpoint =
location_constraint =
acl =
server_side_encryption =
storage_class =

If it looks right, accept with y and exit the setup.

This configuration is saved in the ~/.config/rclone.config file.

3. rclone access to public buckets

You will use the remote you just set up to access NOAA's public buckets on Amazon Web Services S3. Below are the names of some of NOAA's public buckets.

Data	Bucket Name	Documentation
GOES16	noaa-goes16	link
GOES17	noaa-goes17	link
NEXRAD	noaa-nexrad-level2	link
HRRR	noaa-hrrr-bdp-pds	link

Note: bdp-pds stands for Big Data Program Public Data Set

You access the bucket contents by typing the command rclone [command and options] [remote name]:[bucket name]. Documentation for all the commands and options can be found on the rclone website.

List directories and files

# List bucket directories
rclone lsd publicAWS:noaa-goes16/

# List bucket directories for specific folders
rclone lsd publicAWS:noaa-hrrr-bdp-pds/hrrr.20210101

# List files in bucket
rclone ls publicAWS:noaa-hrrr-bdp-pds/hrrr.20210101/conus

Copy file or files to your local machine

rclone copy publicAWS:noaa-goes16/ABI-L2-MCMIPC/2018/283/00/OR_ABI-L2-MCMIPC-M3_G16_s20182830057203_e20182830059576_c20182830100076.nc ./

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Note: Access to HRRR archive on Pando

The remote gateway for Pando is https://pando-rgw01.chpc.utah.edu. You could config rclone to access HRRR on Pando with

[horelS3]
type = s3
provider = Ceph
env_auth = false
endpoint = https://pando-rgw01.chpc.utah.edu

Then look at the bucket with rclone lsd horelS3:hrrr/

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How to use rclone with Python

I like to use rclone to list and access the files within my Python scripts.

To run a basic rclone command within Python, you might use os.system()

import os
os.system('rclone copy publicAWS:noaa-goes16/.../.../etc. ./this_path_on_my_machine/')

If you want to capture the ouput, such as file names, you might consider using subprocess.

import subprocess

# Get output from rclone command
files = subprocess.check_output('rclone lsd goes16AWS:noaa-goes16', shell=True)

# Change type from 'bytes' to 'string'
files = files.decode()

# Split files based on the new line and remove the empty item at the end.
files = files.split('\n')
files.remove('')

Alternatively, you can use subprocess.run().

 a = subprocess.run(['echo','hi'], stdout=subprocess.PIPE).stdout.decode().split('\n')
 a.remove('')