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:

  1. Pick a station,
  2. Pick a variable, and
  3. 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.

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