Compute daily climatology using pandas python

I am trying to use pandas to compute daily climatology. My code is:

import pandas as pd

dates      = pd.date_range('1950-01-01', '1953-12-31', freq='D')
rand_data  = [int(1000*random.random()) for i in xrange(len(dates))]
cum_data   = pd.Series(rand_data, index=dates)
cum_data.to_csv('test.csv', sep="t")

cum_data is the data frame containing daily dates from 1st Jan 1950 to 31st Dec 1953. I want to create a new vector of length 365 with the first element containing the average of rand_data for January 1st for 1950, 1951, 1952 and 1953. And so on for the second element…

Any suggestions how I can do this using pandas?

Answer

You can groupby the day of the year, and the calculate the mean for these groups:

cum_data.groupby(cum_data.index.dayofyear).mean()

However, you have the be aware of leap years. This will cause problems with this approach. As alternative, you can also group by the month and the day:

In [13]: cum_data.groupby([cum_data.index.month, cum_data.index.day]).mean()
Out[13]:
1  1     462.25
   2     631.00
   3     615.50
   4     496.00
...
12  28    378.25
    29    427.75
    30    528.50
    31    678.50
Length: 366, dtype: float64