Historical US extreme-weather day counts (NOAA)
What it measures. Gridded historical temperature and rainfall data converted into practical thresholds, such as the number of days with extreme heat or heavy precipitation.
How it's made. Built by NOAA from the Livneh and nClimGrid observation datasets, reworked into thresholds that line up with future climate projections used in the National Climate Assessment.
How & where you'd use it. Helps communities compare past and projected extremes for climate resilience planning and adaptation decisions.
What's measured
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
Livneh and nClimGrid are gridded observed historical climatology data that were used in the LOCA2 and STAR-ESDM downscaling process of global climate models as part of the 5th National Climate Assessment. The original Livneh and nClimGrid daily temperature and precipitation observations have been converted to a series of decision-relevant thresholds as part of the (U.S. Climate Resilience Information System (CRIS)). These thresholds, such as days with extreme heat or precipitation, have been calculated to match the future projections from LOCA2 and STAR, also available in CRIS.
Get the data
# 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 rioxarrayNOAA Open Data is on public AWS S3 — no login at all (anonymous access).
Official links
- Open data source NOAA Open Data