NOAA Daily Weather — Global Station History

Daily weather from 132,501 stations worldwide, some going back to the 1800s. Temperature, rainfall and snow, one row per station per day, with the quality flags NOAA publishes and most readers discard.

What it does

GHCN-Daily is NOAA's global archive of daily land surface observations. It is published as fixed-width text, one file per station, with each month on a single line and quality flags interleaved with the values.

This Actor reads that format and returns one row per station per day with 29 fields, in metric units, with the flags kept.

Stations can be given by ID or found by name.

What you get

29 fields per row, including date, station_id, station_name, country_code, latitude, longitude, elevation_m, tmax_c, tmin_c, prcp_mm, snow_mm, snow_depth_mm, quality_ok, values_flagged and other_elements.

The table view shows 12 of them; all 29 are in the JSON, CSV and Excel downloads.

Input

Field	Meaning
stations	GHCN station IDs, for example USW00094728.
stationSearch	Find stations by name instead.
fromYear / toYear	Restrict the period.
maxObservations	Stop after this many. 0 removes the cap.

{
  "stations": ["USW00094728"],
  "fromYear": 2020,
  "maxObservations": 1000
}

Sample output

One complete record:

{
  "date": "2020-01-03",
  "station_id": "USW00094728",
  "station_name": "NY CITY CNTRL PARK",
  "country_code": "US",
  "tmax_c": 9.4,
  "tmin_c": 6.7,
  "prcp_mm": 3.8,
  "snow_mm": 0,
  "snow_depth_mm": 0,
  "quality_ok": true,
  "values_flagged": 0,
  "issues": ""
}

Pricing

Event	Per 1,000	Notes
Observation	$0.20	One charge per station-day returned

A station's full history is about $11.40. There is no start fee and no per-row dataset fee.

What it does not do

Nothing is corrected or interpolated. The data is reproduced as published. Quality flags are surfaced, not acted on. A value NOAA flagged is returned with quality_ok false rather than being removed or replaced.

Five elements, not everything. Temperature, precipitation, snowfall and snow depth are extracted into their own fields. Stations record more — other_elements lists what else was present that day — but those values are not parsed into columns.

Gaps are gaps. A station that did not report has no row for that day. The series is not filled in.

No forecasts. This is a historical archive. For current conditions or forecasts, use a weather service.

Notes

Filter on quality_ok before modelling. Everything else is a preference; this one is the difference between a clean series and one containing outliers NOAA already flagged.

Set fromYear. Requesting a full record without it is tens of thousands of rows per station.

Station IDs begin with a two-letter country code, so US, IT and FR prefixes allow geographic filtering after the fact.

other_elements shows what else a station recorded that day, which indicates which stations are worth asking about for wind or humidity.

Support

Open the Issues tab with the station ID and the date of the row in question.

Licence and attribution

Daily observations from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN-Daily), published by NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. As a work of the US federal government it carries no copyright under 17 U.S.C. 105. NOAA does not endorse this Actor.