Skip to content

Daily station observations

noaa:ghcn-daily returns anonymous NCEI daily-summaries CSV. Provide both dates and explicit stations or a geographic query. Stations can be a comma-separated string or a list; explicit IDs take precedence over geographic discovery.

usdata fetch noaa:ghcn-daily -p stations=USW00013967 \
  --start 2024-05-06 --end 2024-05-07 --vars PRCP,TMAX

Dates are inclusive calendar dates; time of day is ignored. units is metric (default) or standard. Variables use NCEI element codes, such as precipitation PRCP and maximum temperature TMAX; availability depends on the station. Unknown adapter options are rejected.

Geographic queries first discover station IDs using the NCEI search service, then request CSV in groups of up to 50 stations. Search and data service outages can occur independently. See service diagnostics.

Open the downloaded file with the pandas reader. The CSV has no units row, so the requested unit system is kept in the frame's attrs["usdata"]["properties"]["units"], and in the lockfile. See the getting-started walkthrough and weather/streamflow example.

Upstream revisions

Agencies revise files in place. A locked restore downloads each pinned URL and fails with a checksum mismatch when the bytes have changed; accept the new bytes for chosen entries with pull --update, or re-resolve the whole manifest with pull --force. A lockfile detects changed data; it does not archive it. Keep the cache with the manifest and lockfile. See provenance and drift.

Metadata sources

Every value in the catalog entry's resolution, cadence, citation, terms, variables, and limits comes from one of these pages. A field the agency does not publish is left empty rather than estimated.

  • Resolution, updates, latency, and citation: the NCEI GHCNd product page, which states the station count, the weekend reconstruction, the 45-to-60-day replacement of real-time streams, and the Menne et al. (2012) citation.
  • Terms: the NCEI dataset record, which carries the access and use constraints.
  • Variables: the element codes this guide names, with the units the Access Data Service returns under units=metric. The element set is open and station-dependent.

All NOAA datasets.

Reference

noaa:ghcn-daily · Released · Included since usdata 0.2. GHCN-Daily Station Observations.

At a glance

Parameters

Pass these as --param name=value to the CLI, as params: entries in a manifest, or as keyword arguments to build_query.

Parameter Meaning
stations Station ids, comma-separated or a list; otherwise a location selects them.
units metric (default) or standard.

Variables

Variable Units Meaning
PRCP mm Precipitation total (metric units)
TMAX degrees Celsius Maximum temperature (metric units)
TMIN degrees Celsius Minimum temperature (metric units)
SNOW mm Snowfall (metric units)
SNWD mm Snow depth (metric units)

Catalog facts

  • Availability: since 0.2
  • Domain: Surface weather
  • Spatial resolution: Land surface stations; more than 100,000 stations in 180 countries and territories
  • Temporal resolution: Daily
  • Updates: Daily, reconstructed each weekend from more than 25 data source components
  • Latency: Real-time streams are replaced by archive-ready sources 45 to 60 days after the end of a month
  • Terms of use: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/metadata/geoportal/rest/metadata/item/gov.noaa.ncdc:C00861/html
  • Citation: Menne, M.J., I. Durre, R.S. Vose, B.E. Gleason, and T.G. Houston, 2012: An overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 29, 897-910, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00103.1
  • Geographic bounds (WGS84): west -180°, south -90°, east 180°, north 90°
  • Catalog date range: 1763-01-01 to open-ended
  • Coverage varies by station, product, and date; the range above does not guarantee observations.
  • Upstream documentation
  • License: US Government Work (public domain)
  • Transport: http
  • Adapter: usdata.providers.noaa.ghcnd:GhcnDaily