March 7, 2024 | John Keefe + Bea Malsky
The U.S. Climate Normals are a large suite of data products that provide information about typical climate conditions for thousands of locations across the United States. Normals act both as a ruler to compare today’s weather and tomorrow’s forecast, and as a predictor of conditions in the near future. The official normals are calculated for a uniform 30 year period, and consist of annual/seasonal, monthly, daily, and hourly averages and statistics of temperature, precipitation, and other climatological variables from almost 15,000 U.S. weather stations.
Example of this data set in use (link):
📍 Advanced Hydrologic Prediction Service (AHPS) Precipitation Analysis
A NOAA product with observed precipitation estimates (for the last 1 day up to a year back) that also includes departures from normal and percent of normal.
Example of this data set in use (link):
📍 State Climate Extremes Committee Climate Monitoring
The SCEC tracks 5 core climatological elements for every state (Maximum Temperature, Minimum Temperature, 24-Hour Precipitation, Monthly Snowfall, Snow Depth).
📍 Check the WFO page for your location office. For example, here’s Baltimore’s: https://www.weather.gov/lwx/ObservedWeatherMaps
Also: https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=lwx
NWS Twitter accounts are also often quite useful!
📍 ThreadEx: Long-Term Station Extremes for America
ThreadEx is a project designed to address the fragmentation of station information over time due to station relocations for the express purpose of calculating daily extremes of temperature and precipitation. There are often changes in the siting of instrumentation for any given National Weather Service/Weather Bureau location over the observational history in a given city/region. As a result, obtaining a long time series (i.e., one hundred years or more) for computation of extremes is difficult, unless records from the various locations are "threaded" or put together. This has been done, but different approaches and combinations of stations have resulted in confusion among data users and the general public about what constitutes an official daily extreme record.
Note that records recorded by WFOs and as noted by ThreadEx don’t always line up, because ThreadEx is bringing together records from multiple nearby locations.
A prototype product using ThreadEx and the National Digital Forecast Database (NDFD) grids to show if there’s a record maximum or minimum temperature (high or low) in the daily forecast for the upcoming week.
Handy period of record by station lookup: https://www.wpc.ncep.noaa.gov/exper/ndfd/inv.all.txt
Example of a story using that hi min parameter (link):
📍 Iowa State University NWS Warning Search
Archive back to 2005 and includes polygons. You can search by county or by point.
The Iowa State Mesonet has a variety of other useful data projects: https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/request/download.phtml?network=FR__ASOS
📍 Global Historical Climatology Network Daily Summaries (GHCN-Daily)
The Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily (GHCN-Daily) dataset integrates daily climate observations from approximately 30 different data sources. [...] Version 3 contains station-based measurements from well over 90,000 land-based stations worldwide, about two thirds of which are for precipitation measurement only. Other meteorological elements include, but are not limited to, daily maximum and minimum temperature, temperature at the time of observation, snowfall and snow depth.
📍 Global Historical Climatology Network Hourly Summaries (GHCNh)
Global Historical Climatology Network-hourly (GHCNh) is a multisource collection of weather station (meteorological) observations from the late 18th Century to the present from fixed weather stations over land across the globe.
Also worth looking through other NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) datasets: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/search/dataset-search
The IEM maintains an ever growing archive of automated airport weather observations from around the world!