Nautical


Nautical
Real-time ocean data from NOAA buoys — Python & Go

Nautical is a library for scraping and parsing real-time and historical oceanographic data from NOAA’s National Data Buoy Center. It supports both Python and Go, and was built for research, data logging, and monitoring — but there are many more possibilities to discover.

Installation

Python (requires 3.9+):

pip install nautical

Go (requires 1.18+):

go get github.com/barbacbd/nautical

Quick Start

from nautical.io.buoy import create_buoy

# Fetch live data for a buoy station
buoy = create_buoy("44099")

if buoy and buoy.valid:
    # Iterate over all available measurements
    for name, value in buoy.data:
        print(f"{name}: {value}")

buoy, err := noaa.CreateBuoy("44099")
if err != nil {
    log.Fatal(err)
}
fmt.Println(buoy)

Features

Buoy Data

A buoy may contain any of the following measurements:

Data

Abbreviation

Units

Wind Speed

wspd

Knots

Gust

gst

Knots

Wave Height

wvht

Feet

Dominant Wave Period

dpd

Seconds

Average Wave Period

apd

Seconds

Pressure

pres

PSI

Pressure Tendency

ptdy

PSI

Air Temperature

atmp

Fahrenheit

Water Temperature

wtmp

Fahrenheit

Dew Point

dewp

Fahrenheit

Salinity

sal

PSU

Visibility

vis

Nautical Miles

Tide

tide

Feet

Swell Height

swh

Feet

Swell Wave Period

swp

Seconds

Wind Wave Height

wwh

Feet

Wind Wave Period

wwp

Seconds

Ocean Temperature

otmp

Fahrenheit

Wind Speed 10m

wspd10m

Knots

Wind Speed 20m

wspd20m

Knots

Depth

depth

Feet

Sources

A source is a group of buoys organized by sponsor or owner. Use sources to discover available buoys by category.

from nautical.io.sources import get_buoy_sources

sources = get_buoy_sources()
for name, source in sources.items():
    print(f"{name}: {len(source)} buoys")

Data Caching

Save and reload buoy data locally. NOAA refreshes data roughly every 30 minutes — the cache lets you avoid redundant network calls.

from nautical.cache import dumps, load

# Save current data
dumps(data)

# Load it back later
cached = load()

Documentation

Development

make setup         # install + activate pre-commit hooks
make test          # run Python and Go tests
make lint          # pylint
make format        # auto-fix formatting (ruff + gofmt)
make docs          # build Sphinx API docs locally
make clean         # remove build artifacts

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for guidelines and commit message conventions.

License

Copyright © 2022–2026, Brent Barbachem. Released under the MIT License.

API Reference