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I am trying to work with the data available from: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/datasets and https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/hcn/
It comes in a .dly file. Is there a way to open this with Python or Excel?
My ultimate goal is to have them in a file format that I can open with Python and Pandas.
These are fixed-width format files - each column is a specific number of characters wide. You can read it with pandas.read_fwf().
There is a readme.txt available at https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn/daily/ for the GHCN data you linked, which includes a title, width and data type for each column. You can supply these to read_fwf() if the automatic width detection doesn't work. I think you have to add the column titles manually though.
edit: I have added an example snippet you can use at https://gitlab.com/snippets/1838910
