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CLIMATE NORMALS·dataset

Typical US weather by place and season (NOAA)

NOAA U.S. Climate Normals
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Average temperature, precipitation, and other climate figures for thousands of US locations, summarizing what 'normal' weather looks like over a standard 30-year span.

How it's made. Calculated by NOAA every ten years from records at nearly 15,000 weather stations, currently covering 1991 to 2020, following international standards.

How & where you'd use it. Acts as a yardstick for judging whether today's weather is unusual, and helps farmers, travellers, and utilities plan around expected conditions.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatemeteorologicalsustainabilityweather

Coverage & cadence

  • Time span— → ongoing

What you can do with it

  • Map air pollutants — NO₂, aerosols, ozone
  • Track greenhouse gases and Earth's energy budget
  • Feed weather and air-quality analysis
Official description

The U.S. Climate Normals are a large suite of data products that provide information about typical climate conditions for thousands of locations across the United States. Normals act both as a ruler to compare today’s weather and tomorrow’s forecast, and as a predictor of conditions in the near future. The official normals are calculated for a uniform 30 year period, and consist of annual/seasonal, monthly, daily, and hourly averages and statistics of temperature, precipitation, and other climatological variables from almost 15,000 U.S. weather stations. NCEI generates the official U.S. normals every 10 years in keeping with the needs of our user community and the requirements of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and National Weather Service (NWS). The 1991–2020 U.S. Climate Normals are the latest in a series of decadal normals first produced in the 1950s. These data allow travelers to pack the right clothes, farmers to plant the best crop varieties, and utilities to plan for seasonal energy usage. Many other important economic decisions that are made beyond the predictive range of standard weather forecasts are either based on or influenced by climate normals.

Get the data

noaa_access.py
# NOAA Open Data on AWS — public S3, no login
import s3fs

fs = s3fs.S3FileSystem(anon=True)
# find this dataset's bucket in the docs link in the sidebar, then:
# files = fs.ls("noaa-<bucket>/...")
# open NetCDF/GRIB with xarray, COGs with rioxarray
NOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).