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

• Python API Reference — auto-generated from source
• Go API Reference — hosted on pkg.go.dev
• Python Tutorials
• Go Tutorials
• Error Handling Guide

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.