add atmospheric pressure into noaa fetch

[galengorski]

We want to add atmospheric pressure as a variable fetched from noaa. This made me think, why don't we fetch temperature and wind from the noaa stations as well. The noaa stations don't have precipitation, but that likely isn't an important driver and we can get that from gridMET. Lewes and Cape May only have barometric pressure, air temperature, and wind starting 08-12-2002, which means we would miss out on 2001, which was a drought year.

[galengorski]

Barometric pressure records from NOAA have gaps, here is a record of 4 stations:

[galengorski]

The gaps are long multi-month gaps. The top three stations (Lewes, Cape May, and Brandywine Shoal) are all pretty close together geographically, so perhaps we could combine data from those sites to create a more complete record. I wanted to look at how similar the observations were to see how reasonable it was to compare the records:

The red line is a 1:1 line

So it looks like the 3 sites have pretty similar observations. I also added a comparison between Cape May and Philadelphia in the bottom right because I wanted to see how different the coastal sites were from a location more inland. Turns out pretty close, but definitely looks different than the sites that are at the mouth of the estuary.

[galengorski]

When we combine Lewes, Cape May, and Brandywine Shoal we get the following record, which is 92% complete (from 08/16/2002-12/02/2019), but still has some substantial multi-month gaps:

[galengorski]

Given this initial look at the data, my questions are:

1. Are there other data sources where we can find more complete barometric pressure records? Or find the time periods that we need to fill these gaps
2. Is combining these records a reasonable approach, at least for the sites that are close together near the mouth of the estuary?
3. We talked briefly about having a pressure record from the mouth of the estuary and one from sites more inland. My understanding was that a difference between the coastal and inland baro pressure might indicate something about the nature or direction of storm tracks. If this is true, should we then try to compile a similar dataset for inland sites?

[galengorski]

@amsnyder @ted80810 @salme146, I would love your thoughts and input