For NOAA CO2 surface flasks we have the downloader and formatter scripts called 'ESRL' - Are these based on the data and what's the difference in format between these two cmorizers? If your cmorizer is more flexible as it's also used for more variables than that old one we could consider deprecating the 'ESRL' one.

For NOAA CO2 surface flasks we have the downloader and formatter scripts called 'ESRL' - Are these based on the data and what's the difference in format between these two cmorizers? If your cmorizer is more flexible as it's also used for more variables than that old one we could consider deprecating the 'ESRL' one.

Good catch, thanks! Hmm as far as I can tell they seem to be dealing with similar datasets (surface station data) and the 'ESRL' implementation seems to encompass broader modalities. I think it might be better then to slightly adapt the existing code if needed (spotted at least that the default file paths to download are for CO2) before adding a new suite of scripts.
I will have a look and do some tests!

@bettina-gier would you have a recommended way to use the formatter script for ESRL since the downloading of the station data is handled jointly in the script? Or like a simple recipe outline to test? I am yet not fully familiar with the processing when it is structured like this..

It's an old cmorizier before we did some restructuring, so it would be better to separate the downloading and formatting indeed. But if you have the raw data it should skip the downloading step. For checking, it's included in the recipes/examples/recipe_check_obs.yml l351ff