Obtaining Precipitation Data from NOAA

NOTE:  NOAA has collected such a massive amount of climatological data that only a few resources are pointed out in this discussion.  Feel free to browse the NOAA web site and/or contact NOAA staff for more information about any given data type.

Example 1

Go to the NOAA National Climatic Data Center at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html.  If this link does not work, follow the bulletted steps below:

Much of the data here is normally bound in several volumes of books and found at most universities.  Data such as precipitation, evaporation, wind, and temperature are recorded monthly and annually.  This information is free online to education but often comes with a cost for other purposes.
  1. Choose the Most Popular Products link.
  2. Choose the Publications link.
  3. Choose the Climatological Data link.
If you require this data for commercial purposes:
  1. Choose a state to and click the Select A State button.
  2. Scroll through the list of available dates and add the desired item(s) to your "shopping cart".


If you require this data for educational purposes:

  1. Click the publications link near the bottom of the page.
  2. Choose the Climatological Data link.
  3. Choose the FREE access by certain agencies and individuals link.
  4. Choose a state from the list.
  5. Click on the desired year.
  6. Click on the file within that year's folder and proceed to download it.  The files are typically Adobe Acrobat (.pdf) files and can only be viewed with the Acrobat Reader (which is available for free download at www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep.html.
  7. The data is typically several pages long, but see the image below for a sample of what it may look like:

Example 2
  1. Return to the NOAA web site at http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/ncdc.html.
  2. Choose the Most Popular Products link.
  3. Choose the Free link.
  4. Click the Climate Visualization link.
  5. Select the Time Series link under the "National Weather Service Summary of the Day" heading.
  6. You have several choices for data acquisition here.  For this example click on the "Display the Period of Record for a Parameter at one Station" link.
  7. Select Utah as the state and click the Continue to Next Page button.
  8. Select a weather station from the list.  Scroll down near the bottom of the list and select station 24127, UT SALT LK CITY INTL AP.
  9. Select "(C) Daily Precipitation" from the "Select the Parameter" list.
  10. You may choose "GIF" or "Postscript" as the Output Format.  For this example choose GIF.
  11. Click on the Submit Graph Values button.
  12. In this case, nearly 60 years of data are displayed in graphical form (see figure below).
  1. Return to http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/onlineprod/tfsod/climvis/main.html.
  2. Choose the "Display One Parameter for One Station for a Specified Time Frame" link.
  3. Select Utah as the state and click the Continue to Next Page button.
  4. Select a weather station from the list.  Scroll down near the bottom of the list and select station 24127, UT SALT LK CITY INTL AP.
  5. Select "(C) Daily Precipitation" from the "Select the Parameter" list.
  6. Enter "1997" in the Enter the Year field.
  7. In the Select Range of Months field, specify January through January (just to see the month of January).
  8. Choose "GIF" as the Output Format.
  9. Click on the Submit Graph Values button.
  10. The graph should look similar to the one below.

 

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