Parse real-time buoy observations from NOAA NDBC realtime2 text feeds
domain: ndbc.noaa.gov · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
No API key is required; fetch the plain-text file for a station directly, e.g., GET https://www.ndbc.noaa.gov/data/realtime2/{station_id}.txt.
Note that realtime2 files only retain roughly the last 45 days of observations (less for some non-NDBC stations) - not a full archive.
Parse the header row(s) plus fixed-column data rows per the NDBC Web Data Guide's documented column definitions for that file type (standard meteorological data uses different columns than spectral wave files).
Handle the documented missing-value sentinel ("MM") for absent sensor readings rather than treating it as zero.
For data older than the realtime2 window, switch to NDBC's separate historical/archive data directories instead.
Known gotchas
Column layout differs by file suffix (e.g., standard met data vs. wave spectral data) - a single fixed parser won't work across all file types.
Missing sensor values are encoded with a sentinel string ("MM"), not blank/null - naive numeric parsing will break on these.
This is a rolling ~45-day window only; long-term analysis requires the separate historical archive, not realtime2.
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