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I am looking for historical hourly temperature data from many cities in the US what other data sources are there except wunderground?

UPDATE: I will use the data to compare stations from the same city and need data with high temporal & spatial resolution; currently, one year of data is enough. I am not mentioning a specific US city because I need data from as many cities in the US as possible that meet my requirements. I am working on a big project of forecasting and I want to see the spatial deviations with in many large cities in the US.

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4 Answers 4

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The authoritative sources for your data are:

  1. ASOS: Automated Surface Observation Systems at airports, and
  2. MADIS: the Meteorological Assimilation Data Ingest System, from NOAA

Those are collections based on calibrated, maintained equipment, with good geographic coverage.

And Wunderground already archives them, so it's a matter of selecting and using those, rather than the Wunderground data from their own source, the collection of personal weather stations.

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    $\begingroup$ anything like this for europe? $\endgroup$
    – Edoardo
    Commented Aug 4, 2017 at 11:59
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ASOS data for all the airports in the world: https://mesonet.agron.iastate.edu/request/download.phtml

This website also has a lot of other meteorological data for the United States.

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ACCA Manual J: Residential Load Calculation, look in the back and they have a table of BIN temperatures for most U.S. Cities.

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I needed hourly historical data for my zip code for heat pump comparison. NOAA only had data for 2 cities in all of NY and neither were relevant. I tried to use one of them anyway and also found lots of -9999 temps in each year for which i assume is when there were outages. Also, the reports were in a horribly unusable format with space-aligned columns rather than using something more easily consumable like CSV.

I later found https://www.visualcrossing.com/. This one let you build a query and choose which data points you want on your report as well as if you want json or csv format for your output. I didn't find any missing data points when i got 10 years worth of data for my zip. It wasn't free, but it was incredibly reasonable at only about 87 cents per year. It was definitely worth a dollar to not have to mess with cleaning up the data from noaa.

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  • $\begingroup$ What NOAA source were you trying? Because there should be more than 2 sites. Any actual data visualcrossing is almost certainly coming from NOAA. If there's no ASOS like site in your zip code... you may be using interpolated/model data. I agree NOAA can be frustrating to use, but depending on what you're doing, it may be important to know what data you're using. $\endgroup$
    – JeopardyTempest
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 22:22
  • $\begingroup$ Indeed their archived data page says "NOTE: Visual Crossing does not snap your location to the nearest weather station but rather it uses multiple nearby stations to interpolate more exact weather for your detailed, custom location. The more accurate your location you give, the more accurate your weather will be." So it's not actual observations, but interpolated using whatever methods they choose. Reasonable data in some/many situations, but the caveat is important. $\endgroup$
    – JeopardyTempest
    Commented Sep 11, 2022 at 22:22
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    $\begingroup$ @JeopardyTempest The noaa location i was downloading from was here. ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/uscrn/products/hourly02 $\endgroup$
    – Bill Tarbell
    Commented Sep 15, 2022 at 3:45
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    $\begingroup$ Interesting... yet another level of site categorization. I was familiar with climate reporting stations (each NWS site has a few... weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=okx for the NYC region). Didn't know they had yet another level. I guess the attempt is to use more rural sites with long well-kept records that are less affected by urban change (though some of those locations may still not be perfect). A fair idea. But suffice to say NOAA and other agencies do make it a complex mess of different download sites and site categories instead of making it simple to find and download data :-( $\endgroup$
    – JeopardyTempest
    Commented Sep 15, 2022 at 14:00

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