Earth Data School
About
Full catalog/GHCN
GHCN·dataset

Daily weather records from global ground stations (NOAA)

NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network Daily (GHCN-D)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Day-by-day weather readings from thousands of land-based stations around the world. Roughly two-thirds report only rainfall, while others add daily high and low temperatures, snowfall, and snow depth. Some records reach back more than 175 years.

How it's made. NOAA assembled it by merging climate records from many sources and running them all through the same quality-control checks; it is delivered as one CSV file per year, from 1763 to today.

How & where you'd use it. A go-to archive for studying long-term climate trends, comparing today's weather to the past, and supporting agriculture research.

What's measured

aws-pdsagricultureclimatemeteorologicalweather

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

UPDATE TO GHCN PREFIXES - The NODD team is working on improving performance and access to the GHCNd data and will be implementing an updated prefix structure. For more information on the prefix changes, please see the "READ ME on the NODD Github". If you have questions, comments, or feedback, please reach out to nodd@noaa.gov with GHCN in the subject line. Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily is a dataset from NOAA that contains daily observations over global land areas. It contains station-based measurements from land-based stations worldwide, about two thirds of which are for precipitation measurement only. Other meteorological elements include, but are not limited to, daily maximum and minimum temperature, temperature at the time of observation, snowfall and snow depth. It is a composite of climate records from numerous sources that were merged together and subjected to a common suite of quality assurance reviews. Some data are more than 175 years old. The data is in CSV format. Each file corresponds to a year from 1763 to present and is named as such.

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).