One of the missions that NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) undertakes is the summarization and compilation of a variety of climate statistics from their archive of weather data that have been submitted to the Center from the national network of weather stations. These summaries are then disseminated, providing the public with information about the climate of the nation, whether on a local, state or regional level. The predecessor to NCEI, the National Climatic Data Center (or NCDC) published several series identified under the title "The Climatography of the United States." Literally, climatography represents a quantitative description of climate that usually involve development of tables and charts that portray the characteristic values of selected climatic elements at a station or over an area. Some of these climatographies provided a variety of daily, monthly and annual normal climate data for agricultural, transportation and other interests for 1971-2000 standard climatological averaging interval.
New normals for the basic climate elements (temperature and precipitation) covering the new 1981-2010 interval became available in July 2011. Within the last two years, NCEI has provided the public access to dynamically generated climatographies for monthly, annual/seasonal, daily and hourly normals for several thousand individual stations throughout the nation. Climographs, or simple graphs of the monthly normals data for temperature and precipitation, can be generated by accessing NCEI's "1981-2010 Climate Normals -Climographs" link. The supporting data used to build these graphs are also available. Selection of the Data Access tab will provide the opportunity to select Monthly, Daily, Annual/Seasonal or Hourly normals on the Data Tools page.
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Prepared by Edward J. Hopkins, Ph.D., email hopkins@aos.wisc.edu
© Copyright, 2018, The American Meteorological Society.