US station data climate data set

US Station Data:Plotting and Analysis | Help: Plots of Distributions | Help: Climatology Plots | Help: Time Series

The data was supplied courtesy of Henry Diaz of the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory. Station data was obtained by a wide variety of sources including NWS COOP stations and first-order stations. Data was quality controlled. For stations without data, data was either inpterpolated or estimated. Various methods were used for interpolation including using nearby stations, using a spline-fit or climatology. The quality of the interpolations follow that order.

I used a subset of the possible stations that had both temperature and precipitation available. I also required that the data covered 1950 to 1999. Some of those values could be estimates, especially at the beginning and end of the timeseries. Of 11,200 stations with precipitation data and 6000 with temperature data, 2985 had both for the period 1950 to 1999.

A file with information for each station including latitude, longitude, elevation, state and climate division is available.

In addition to the station data, there are 342 out of the 344 possible climate divisions available. Because of how I restricted the station data, there may not be a large number of stations averaged for each division. On average, there are about 10 but the number of stations averaged range from 1 to 30. The climate divisions were calculated by averaging all the stations w/i a division. NO attempt was made to area average or otherwise weight the data. Climate Divisions are currently indicated by being in lower case with a CD appended.

A file with information for each climate division including average latitude, longitude, elevation, state, climate division number and number of stations available for each division (from the station data subset of 2985 stations) is available.

Reference:

Eischeid J.K., P. Pasteris, H.F. Diaz, M. Plantico, and N. Lott, 2000: Creating a serially complete, national daily time series of temperature and precipitation for the Western United States. J. of Appl. Meteorol., 39, 1580-1591 .

Please do not redistribute the individual data values in this data set without permission from PSL. Plots created from this data can be used. We ask that you acknowledge the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder, Colorado. For example "Image provided by the NOAA/ESRL Physical Sciences Laboratory, Boulder Colorado from their Web site at http://psl.noaa.gov/".