Beacon is developed as a high performance data lake technology, supporting direct subsetting (slicing) through large collection of environmental (and other) data collections stored in NetCDF, ASCII, ZARR or databases. But how fast is it when really pushed to the limit by exceptionally large collections, in this use case, ERA5 Daily data? Public data for 1950-2025 is retrieved from the C3S Climate Data Store, converted to Zarr, and published through Beacon.
This pipeline, which was easy and fast to set up, makes the collection directly queryable, so users can subset and download only the data they need without manual preprocessing.
The published dataset includes the following parameters:
- 2m temperature
- 2m temperature daily maximum
- 2m temperature daily minimum
- precipitation
- mean sea level pressure
- z500 geopotential
Please test it yourself in a few simple steps.
Access
Beacon endpoint: https://beacon-era5.maris.nl/
Install the Python SDK:
pip install beacon-api
Query example
The example below selects longitude, latitude, time, and temperature (t2m) for a spatial bounding box and a June 2024 time range, then returns the result as a pandas DataFrame.
from beacon_api import *
client = Client("https://beacon-era5.maris.nl/")
daily_collection = client.list_tables()['daily_single_levels']
(
daily_collection.query()
.add_select_column('longitude')
.add_select_column('latitude')
.add_select_column('valid_time')
.add_select_column('t2m')
.add_bbox_filter('longitude','latitude', (30, 30, 40, 40)) # bounding box (lon_min, lat_min, lon_max, lat_max)
.add_range_filter('valid_time', gt_eq="1950-06-01T00:00:00Z", lt_eq="2024-06-30T23:59:59Z")
.to_pandas_dataframe()
)
Want to go straight into an example notebook? Visit our examples on Github.
Notebook visualizing on the fly 75 years of ERA5 observations in the Netherlands: https://github.com/maris-development/beacon-example/blob/main/notebooks/era5-satellite/daily_temperature_75_years.ipynb
Notebook visualizing global one day values on the fly: https://github.com/maris-development/beacon-example/blob/main/notebooks/era5-satellite/global_single_day.ipynb
