Pandas – How to flatten a hierarchical index in columns

I think the easiest way to do this would be to set the columns to the top level:

df.columns = df.columns.get_level_values(0)

Note: if the to level has a name you can also access it by this, rather than 0.

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If you want to combine/join your MultiIndex into one Index (assuming you have just string entries in your columns) you could:

df.columns = [' '.join(col).strip() for col in df.columns.values]

Note: we must strip the whitespace for when there is no second index.

In [11]: [' '.join(col).strip() for col in df.columns.values]
Out[11]: 
['USAF',
 'WBAN',
 'day',
 'month',
 's_CD sum',
 's_CL sum',
 's_CNT sum',
 's_PC sum',
 'tempf amax',
 'tempf amin',
 'year']