Wednesday, December 18, 2019

Temperature Quilt - How to obtain weather data from NOAA

Quite a few quilters have had trouble navigating the NOAA site in order to get a hold of historical data for planning purposes, so I thought I'd post a step-by-step tutorial of sorts.

1. Go to this page online: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/ and click on "Search Tool".


2. On the next page, select "Daily Summaries" and the date range you would like data for. It defaults to the current year but for planning purposes I suggest 2 full years.

3. Select "Stations" in the Search For box and type your city or airport. Click on "Search".

4. A map will pop up with a selection of stations. You may have to zoom in to get closer to your location. Before choosing a location, check to make sure all the data for that station is available.
Airports are the most reliable. Many smaller stations are backyard weather stations and data may not be updated regularly. You can download the data for a station and check to see how often it is being updated.

5. Click on "Add to Cart" for your selected station.

5. On the top right of the screen, click on "Cart" and "View all Items".

6. Select your cart options.

If you'd like to use Excel (or other software that can read CSV files), choose the CSV option. This will be the easiest way to play with data.
If you do not have Excel, you can select "Daily Text".

Check and make sure your dates and station are correct and click "continue". It sometimes defaults back to the current year, so be sure to check again.

7. On the next page, select "Station Name" and the data you would like to receive. I usually only choose "Air Temperature" but some quilters like to add something extra to indicate precipitation on their quilt.

Click "Continue".

8.  Double check all the information on this page and enter your email address. NOAA will email you a file with your data.

Voila!

UPDATE 12/29/2020:
Apparently there are locations for which the NOAA site does not have a whole lot of data.
I have been told that Farmer's Almanac is another source to look at, as well as Weather Underground.






6 comments:

  1. With this available data, you could even go back and make a quilt reflecting the year you got married, when a child was born, etc. Thank you!

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  2. Yes, you could! So many possibilities, so little time...

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  3. I would love to pull the weather data for the whole year of 1965 to include my birth year and I am going to do for 2021 weather too as starting a new hobby!!! let me know how I get the whole year of 1965 as I did follow your steps on the blog #3 and as it stated clear step by step and still on the select cart options it didn't show 1965 range dates... so help here... Thank you Linda

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  4. Someone doing a temperature quilt shared a spreadsheet where they’d already made custom rules for applying colors in the cell based on temperature and also columns that totaled how many of each temperature range there were in the month. Would you know who did that?

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  5. Thanks so much for the step-by-step to find the data!

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