Mar 21, 2012 International data comes in the form of IWEC or International Weather for Energy Calculations files. This data covers 277 locations outside of the United States and Canada and is based on approximately 18 years of data that has its roots in DATSAV3 data that, near as I can tell, is all part of the Integrated Surface Database. The International Activities Office (IA) coordinates all international cooperation for the National Weather Service (NWS) and is located within the Office of the Assistant Administrator for Weather Services. Louis Uccellini, who is the NWS Director, also serves as the Permanent Representative. Obtain the latest weather files for global locations, future climate predictions and CIBSE data for UK Building Regulations Compliance.
- International; Citing SAM; Contact. Preparing this data for use in a weather data file involves. Create weather files with your own data. SAM's Weather File.
- ASHRAE Climate Data Center Share This. Ensure that your Load or Energy Calculations Are Based on Climate Data from ASHRAE: International Weather for Energy Calculations—Typical weather files, suitable for use with building energy simulation programs for 3,012 locations outside the United States and Canada. Purchase the DVD or individual files.
- Home > Data Access > Quick Links. Data files: Additional Information. NOAA's Severe Weather Data Inventory.
Where can I find historical raw weather data for a project I am doing with focus on the USA and Canada. I need temperatures mainly, but other details would be nice. I am having a very hard time finding this data. I really dont want to have to scrape a weather site.
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3 Answers
At the United States National Severe Storms Laboratory Historical Weather Data Archive (note: this has since been retired).
Also, the United States National Climatic Data Center Geodata Portal.
The United States National Climatic Data Center Climate Data Online.
The United States National Climatic Data Center Most Popular Products.
I found myself asking this same question, and will share my experience for future Googlers.
Data sources
I wanted raw data, and lots of it... an API wouldn't do. I needed to head directly to the source. The best source for all of that data seemed to be either the NCEP or NCDC NOMADS servers:
http://nomads.ncdc.noaa.gov/dods/ <- good for historical data
http://nomads.ncep.noaa.gov/dods/ <- good for recent data
(Note: A commenter indicated that you must now use https rather than http. I haven't tested it yet, but if you're having issues, try that!)
To give an idea of the amount of data, their data goes all the way back to 1979! If you're looking for Canada and the US, the North American Regional Reanalysis dataset is probably your best answer.
Using the data
I'm a big python user, and either pydap or NetCDF seemed like good tools to use. For no particular reason, I started playing around with pydap.
To give an example of how to get all of the temperature data for a particular location from the nomads website, try the following in python:
The above snippet will get you a time series (every three hours) of data for the entire month of January, 1979! If you needed multiple locations or all of the months, the above code would easily be modified to accommodate.
To super-data... and beyond!
I wasn't happy stopping there. I wanted this data in a SQL database so that I could easily slice and dice it. A great option for doing all of this is the python forecasting module.
Disclosure: I put together the code behind the module. The code is all open source -- you can modify it to better meet your needs (maybe you're forecasting for Mars?) or pull out little snippets for your project.
National Weather Data
My goal was to be able to grab the latest forecast from the Rapid Refresh model (your best bet if you want accurate info on current weather):
and then to plot the data on a map of the good 'ole USA:
The data for the plot came directly from SQL and could easily modify the query to get out any type of data desired.
If the above example isn't enough, check out the documentation, where you can find more examples.
Weather Data History
wunderground.com has a good API. It is free for 500 calls per day.