NOAA NCEI Daily Climate Scraper — Station Weather History

Pull daily-summary climate observations from the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) for any GHCN-Daily station, in any date window, with values automatically converted out of NCEI's raw "tenths" encoding into clean metric (°C, mm) or imperial (°F, in) units.

GHCN-Daily is the world's largest archive of station weather observations — thousands of U.S. and international stations, decades of history, with daily max/min temperature, precipitation, snowfall, snow depth, wind, and dozens of other variables. The NCEI access API exposes it as JSON. This actor wraps that API, normalizes the data, and ships it as one row per station/date.

What you get

Field	Description
date	Observation date (YYYY-MM-DD)
station	GHCN station ID
tmax	Maximum daily temperature (°C metric / °F imperial)
tmin	Minimum daily temperature
tavg	Average daily temperature (when reported)
prcp	Precipitation (mm metric / inches imperial)
snow	Snowfall (mm metric / inches imperial)
snwd	Snow depth at observation time
awnd	Average daily wind (m/s metric / mph imperial) when requested
units	metric, imperial, or raw

Any other GHCN variable you request (TOBS, WSF2, WT01, MDPR, etc.) is included as a lower-case key on the row.

How to scrape NOAA daily climate data

1. Click Try for free to start a default run for three U.S. cities (NYC Central Park, Chicago O'Hare, Phoenix Sky Harbor) over the last 30 days.
2. Edit the stations array to point at your stations of interest. Find IDs at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/search/data-search/daily-summaries.
3. Set startDate / endDate (YYYY-MM-DD) for any historical window — NCEI has data back into the 1800s for some stations.
4. Toggle units between metric (default), imperial, or raw if you want the original NCEI tenths.

Pricing

$0.003 per row. A single station × 365 days returns roughly 365 rows ≈ $1.10 plus minimal compute. Multi-decade backfills cost more — set maxResults if you want to cap a run.

Example input

{
    "stations": ["USW00094728"],
    "startDate": "2024-01-01",
    "endDate": "2024-12-31",
    "dataTypes": ["TMAX", "TMIN", "PRCP", "SNOW", "SNWD"],
    "units": "imperial"
}

Example output

{
    "date": "2024-01-15",
    "station": "USW00094728",
    "tmax": 25,
    "tmin": 12,
    "prcp": 0.12,
    "snow": 0.5,
    "snwd": 1,
    "units": "imperial",
    "sourceUrl": "https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/services/data/v1?dataset=daily-summaries&stations=USW00094728&startDate=2024-01-01&endDate=2024-12-31&dataTypes=TMAX,TMIN,PRCP,SNOW,SNWD&format=json&units=standard"
}

Use cases

• Climate / energy analytics — Heating-degree-day (HDD) and cooling-degree-day (CDD) computation.
• Insurance / cat modeling — Look up historical conditions on a claim date.
• Agriculture — Multi-year precipitation and frost-day analysis.
• Real estate / property risk — Quantify a property's historical extreme-weather exposure.
• Outdoor sports / events — Seasonal weather profiles for venue planning.

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• fema-disasters-scraper — FEMA disaster declarations.

FAQ

Q: Where do I find station IDs? A: NCEI's station finder at https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/access/search/data-search/daily-summaries lets you search by name, city, or coordinates and copy the USW00094728-style ID.

Q: Why are some values missing? A: Stations only report variables they instrument — not every station has snow depth or wind speed. Missing values are simply omitted from the row.

Q: Why are temperatures sometimes negative integers (e.g. -89)? A: That's the raw NCEI "tenths of degrees Celsius" encoding (so -89 = -8.9°C). The actor converts these for you when units is metric or imperial. Set units: "raw" to opt out.

Q: How far back can I go? A: GHCN-Daily has records into the 1800s for the longest-running stations. The API will return whatever is available within the requested window.

Legal

Data is sourced from the public NOAA NCEI access API (ncei.noaa.gov/access/services/data/v1). This actor is not affiliated with or endorsed by NOAA. Use is subject to NOAA's open-data terms.