Historical monthly temperatures for Seattle?
December 1, 2018 8:36 AM Subscribe
I am interested in finding this, but for Seattle. "fwd" in the URL stands for Dallas-Fort Worth. The equivalent string for Seattle is "sew", but alas, the days of transparent URL hackery are gone.
I haven't even been able to find the link *to* the DFW table on the DFW page. It looks to me that it may have been a one-off built product specific to the regional team maintaining and publishing the DFW data pages.
What I found as I fruitlessly picked through the array of links included broken links on weather.gov to various bitrotted NOAA URLs, often including the word "climate". There does a ppear to be a way to pull down daily historical records, on a day by day basis... for up to one year.
My conclusion? Trumpfuckery.
Surely this simple dataset, which I wish to use to correlate my average annual gas-heat usage over the past ten years, must be easily available. Where is it?
I haven't even been able to find the link *to* the DFW table on the DFW page. It looks to me that it may have been a one-off built product specific to the regional team maintaining and publishing the DFW data pages.
What I found as I fruitlessly picked through the array of links included broken links on weather.gov to various bitrotted NOAA URLs, often including the word "climate". There does a ppear to be a way to pull down daily historical records, on a day by day basis... for up to one year.
My conclusion? Trumpfuckery.
Surely this simple dataset, which I wish to use to correlate my average annual gas-heat usage over the past ten years, must be easily available. Where is it?
Best answer: Try here? NOWData -> Monthly Summarized Data -> Avg. Temp?
posted by sagc at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
posted by sagc at 9:47 AM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Best answer: You get to that link by going here and clicking on your location on the map.
posted by aniola at 10:24 AM on December 1, 2018
posted by aniola at 10:24 AM on December 1, 2018
The regional forecast offices all seem to have different approaches to this. You can start with some top-level URL hackery (weather.gov/CODE, where fwd is Fort Worth/Dallas, TX, lwx is [somehow] Baltimore/Washington and sew is Seattle/Tacoma, WA). From there the stuff you want is somewhere under the "Climate and Past Weather" option but where, exactly, seems to depend on the regional office. LWX has the most extensive presentation of the three, presumably because of the whole Nation's Capital thing. The one for central Oklahoma has a page for tornado data. If I knew more about interesting regional weather I'm sure I could find more interesting regional data to look at.
posted by fedward at 11:42 AM on December 1, 2018
posted by fedward at 11:42 AM on December 1, 2018
What about the Global Summary of the Month dataset from climate.gov?
posted by clockwork at 3:19 PM on December 1, 2018
posted by clockwork at 3:19 PM on December 1, 2018
I work for a NWS office, but not one of the ones in question. It looked like the Dallas office locally posted that dataset, it isn't one that is standard for the web pages. And no, it isn't Trumpfuckery, just the fact the the NWS web pages have kind of sucked for years and sometimes even employees have difficulties finding things.
You could try calling or emailing the Seattle office to see if they could recreate what Dallas did. If they are too busy though, they may just refer you to the NCDC page. I've only worked in smaller offices and we accommodate those requests if the weather is quiet, but for a bigger city they may have more workload.
posted by weathergal at 5:45 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
You could try calling or emailing the Seattle office to see if they could recreate what Dallas did. If they are too busy though, they may just refer you to the NCDC page. I've only worked in smaller offices and we accommodate those requests if the weather is quiet, but for a bigger city they may have more workload.
posted by weathergal at 5:45 PM on December 1, 2018 [1 favorite]
Just to echo weathergal, you can definitely call them up and ask. Every time I've called the nearby regional offices for work assignments they've been beyond helpful.
posted by asterisk at 9:04 AM on December 2, 2018
posted by asterisk at 9:04 AM on December 2, 2018
Response by poster: The dataset request from the NOAA page was returned quickly, I just haven't opened it into a spreadsheet to get the temps out. I'm expecting it to include daily highs and lows for the entire ten year period (plus whatever else is included, there was no evident way to filter the request to just temps) so about 3650 lines that I'll need to curnch on a bit - or maybe just take the first day of each month, or something.
On preview, sagc and aninola's pointer to NOWData is absolutely exactly what I was looking for, sadly without a persistent URL that I can immediately link. Thanks AskMe!
posted by mwhybark at 10:44 AM on December 2, 2018
On preview, sagc and aninola's pointer to NOWData is absolutely exactly what I was looking for, sadly without a persistent URL that I can immediately link. Thanks AskMe!
posted by mwhybark at 10:44 AM on December 2, 2018
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posted by mwhybark at 8:58 AM on December 1, 2018