Monday, June 9, 2014

NOAA GHCN station portal

NOAA has a rather unpublicized collection of visualisations of station data. I'll show Honolulu below the jump. It gives a visual summary of even monthly data, contrasts adjusted and unadjusted, including trends. You can enlarge in a new window.

Unfortunately, access seems to be only via an ftp directory in which the filenames are just number codes. Further it is broken into subdirectories which take a long time to load (just the filenames). So I thought I'd develop a portal. The one below is effectively just an extract of the inventory file, but with each station name linked  directly to its NOAA information.

I'm aiming to make something fancier with Javascript, to maybe select from a map etc. But the text version is a good start.

Update I'm glad to see the New NCDC has draggable graphs</a>. On looking further, I see they are using a service called multigraph.

Here is the station level information for Honolulu. It has been talked about lately because there has been recent decline, and in recent months the adjusted value has not been included. But it's actually of interest because the unadjusted data over the long term rises steeply, and the adjustment brings the trend down.



Now here is the list. As well as the station name and country, it shows the number of years of data, and the most recent year in which there is data. You can do text search (Ctrl-F) within the frame.




3 comments:

  1. Thanks, Nick. Interesting stuff.

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  2. Found I can simply copy and paste your list into MS Excel, where I can do custom sorts, eg. rank Canadian stats by last year of data, then by number of years of records. Thanks!

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    Replies
    1. You might like to try combining with the inventory file; they should line up. The inv file has more info, but not the dates.

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