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Full catalog/ISD
ISD·dataset

Global hourly weather observations archive (NOAA ISD)

NOAA Integrated Surface Database (ISD)
atmosphere NOAA NOAA active
In plain English

What it measures. Hourly weather readings from more than 35,000 stations worldwide, covering wind speed and direction, gusts, temperature, dew point, clouds, pressure, current weather, visibility, rainfall over various periods, and snow depth. Some records go back to 1901.

How it's made. NOAA compiled it by merging weather observations from many sources into a single consistent format at its Federal Climate Complex in Asheville.

How & where you'd use it. A deep, detailed source for climate research, weather analysis, and applications needing hourly station data over many decades.

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

The Integrated Surface Database (ISD) consists of global hourly and synoptic observations compiled from numerous sources into a gzipped fixed width format. ISD was developed as a joint activity within Asheville's Federal Climate Complex. The database includes over 35,000 stations worldwide, with some having data as far back as 1901, though the data show a substantial increase in volume in the 1940s and again in the early 1970s. Currently, there are over 14,000 "active" stations updated daily in the database. The total uncompressed data volume is around 600 gigabytes; however, it continues to grow as more data are added. ISD includes numerous parameters such as wind speed and direction, wind gust, temperature, dew point, cloud data, sea level pressure, altimeter setting, station pressure, present weather, visibility, precipitation amounts for various time periods, snow depth, and various other elements as observed by each station.

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).