Using Daily Weather Station Data
The NOAA DAILY STATION data has a wide variety of daily weather data (precipitation, mean temperature, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, snow depth, wind speed, bad weather indicator, etc) from almost 10000 stations. Its sheer size means that one cannot simply download everything.
There are three steps to downloading station weather data:
- Pick a station,
- Pick a variable, and
- Pick a data table format.
Pick a station
We start with the NOAA NCDC DAILY STATION,
and we have a map of data locations. If you click on that map at the spot you
are interested in, you get the a list of stations, like
There are a number of ways to
select among the 10000 stations on the map.
- If you click on that map at the spot you
are interested in, you get the nearest station. You also get a link
to a list
of all the stations in the current view.
(The list follows the map; if you change the domain size the map will
change to be centered on the point you picked and it will be more
focussed). To focus the map on a particular area, enter the
longitude/latitude limits in the four boxes, and click redraw,
or use the 'Zoom' menu to select x2 or x4 and click on
the spot of the map you want to center upon (repeated zooming
can get you here, for example). You can then choose to label the points (like this by changing 'no labels' to 'Name'.)
- If you click on Searches,
you get a form that lets you search on any or all of the station
characteristics: name, country, elevation, latitude, longitude.
The latitude/longitude search is the same as zooming in on the
map (above).
So do a search or zoom and Now pick a station from the list by clicking on the name, in this case
NEW HAVEN/TWEED.
Views
Normally at this point, one would like to view the data, to at least
make sure you have gotten what you want. So choose the
data viewer (this is an odd plot because it is the Bad Weather Indicator, but changing the variable menu to pick the data
that you want, say mean temp. Someday you could then choose
Select only the data in the
current view, to get to the temperature data.
Pick a variable
Alternatively, back at the NEW HAVEN/TWEED page, we could first explicitly pick the variable.
Now there are many variables listed: mean temperature, minimum temperature, maximum
temperature, precipitation, windspeed, snow depth, etc.
Let's pick
mean
and then
temperature. Again, we could choose the viewer to look at the data: this time the view goes straight to temperature.
Pick a data table format
You said you wanted spreadsheet formatted data. There is a table of options
across the top of the page, choose Data Files or Tables.
There are number of formats available, but
Columnar Table is what many people find easy to use, particularly the tsv versions which are easily loadable into spreadsheets.
I would suggest also reading some of the questions in the questions
and answers section:
there are several examples of getting the daily data for a particular station
(the
Bend, OR example is close, as is the following Newport RI, and Glenn's
questions.)
Again, you should look at the answers to the earlier questions: there are
other useful options along the way.
Benno