Data tool provides insight into recent weather and climate behavior
Did you know that NCEI provides an easy and quick way to search for temperature, precipitation, and snowfall station records set on a given day or month? Our Daily Weather Records Data Tool provides summaries of recent global and U.S. daily weather records with options to view monthly, annual, all-time, or selected records.
This easy-to-use product displays the number of stations that either tied or broke a daily, monthly, or all-time record. While these simplistic counts of records can provide insights into recent climate behavior, they do not supply a definitive way to identify trends in the number of records set over time.
The tool analyzes records from a subset of stations in the Global Historical Climatological Network. For a station to be considered for any parameter, it must have a minimum of 30 years of data with more than 182 days of data each year. This is effectively a “30-year record of service” requirement, but allows for inclusion of some stations which routinely shut down during certain seasons.
Small station moves, such as a move from one property to an adjacent property, may occur within a station history. However, larger moves, such as a station moving from downtown to the city airport, generally result in the commissioning of a new station identifier. This tool treats each of these histories as a different station. In this way, it does not “thread” the separate histories into one record for a city.
What can U.S. daily records tell us?
Since the United States covers a large and diverse landmass, it has widely varying climate conditions. Factors that affect local climates include topography, elevation, proximity to oceans, lakes, and rivers, and latitude. These temperature and precipitation records reflect some of the unique climate conditions of the different areas of the country.
