COLL 320: Scholarly Project #2

"Our data sources include the National Weather Service (COOP / GHCN data), The Natural Resources Conservation Service (SNOTEL), USGS (stream gages), Remote Automated Weather Stations, the Hydrometeorological Automated Data System, and a variety of other met stations and dataloggers. Even though new data arrives every day, SOME of the manual weather stations (red stars on the maps) may show a lag of a week or two before measurements are available. Many climate data sets have missing values. At manual weather stations, the observer might not have written down an observation for a particular day. At an automated station, there may have been an equipment malfunction or a data processing error.

It is important to handle missing values correctly when you calculate monthly or annual total / averages. If you blindly calculate a monthly temperature average for a month that has only 2 days of data, for example, you might get an average value that is not very representative of reality. Therefore, this web site will not display a monthly / annual total or average for a climate parameter if there is "too much" missing data. In this context, "too much" data is missing if there are more than 5 days of temperature or 3 days of precipitation measurements missing during a month. For annual total / averages, a year will be left blank in a graph or table if there are more than 15 days of missing measurements."

NCEI stands for the National Centers for Environmental Information. "NCEI provides environmental data, products, and services covering the depths of the ocean to the surface of the sun to drive resilience, prosperity, and equity for current and future generations."