Trying To Work With NOAA Coastal Data. How Are People Navigating This?

I’ve been trying to get more familiar with NOAA coastal datasets for a research project, and honestly the hardest part hasn’t been modeling — it’s just figuring out what data exists and how to navigate it.

I was looking at stations near Long Beach because I wanted wave + wind data in the same area. That turned into a lot of bouncing between IOOS and NDBC pages, checking variable lists, figuring out which station measures what, etc. It felt surprisingly manual.

I eventually started exploring here:
https://aquaview.org/explore?c=IOOS_SENSORS%2CNDBC&lon=-118.2227&lat=33.7152&z=12.39

Seeing IOOS and NDBC stations together on a map made it much easier to understand what was available. Once I had the dataset IDs, I pulled the data programmatically through the STAC endpoint:
https://aquaview-sfeos-1025757962819.us-east1.run.app/api.html#/

From there I merged:

• IOOS/CDIP wave data (significant wave height + periods)
• Nearby NDBC wind observations

Resampled to hourly (2016–2025), added a couple lag features, and created a simple extreme-wave label (95th percentile threshold). The actual modeling was straightforward.

What I’m still trying to understand is: what’s the “normal” workflow people use for NOAA data? Are most people manually navigating portals? Are STAC-based approaches common outside satellite imagery?

Just trying to learn how others approach this. Would appreciate any insight.