How to download Australia Bureau of Meteorology temperature data (easily)

Australia's BOM would like you to waste a lot of time downloading their temperature data. Here is a simple program that will help you do it quickly.

You need this program:

getthebomdata.bash [1]

and you need the BOM's list of stations:

ftp://ftp.bom.gov.au/anon2/home/ncc/metadata/sitelists/stations.zip [2]

which you unzip.

Create an empty directory, then run getthebomdata.bash in that directory, as follows.

For daily data:

getthebomdata.bash stations.txt daily

For monthly data:

getthebomdata.bash stations.txt monthly

There are about 20,000 stations, the script tries every one, but only about 2,000 have data. Go have a cup of tea. In fact, have a 7 course banquet, watch a movie, go shopping...

(It's a linux script, of course, but who would do serious work on anything else? Should work on a Mac though, but not tested.)