Getting GSOD
This is a discursive recipe for turning the Global Summary of the Day weather dataset into a useful PostgreSQL database on a Unix system. It's aimed at data nerds with no prior knowledge of GSOD. For simplicity, it only describes one way of doing things, but the canny reader will see many possible variations (for example, using staged temporary files rather than a pipeline to do data conversion) and substitutions (mysql for postgres, curl for wget, perl for python, …).
Depending on how you do things, you’ll need something like 50 free gigabytes of disk space to work in, and the final database will use about 20 gigabytes.