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Local Climatological Data

Available since v0.14.0 as noaa:lcd. LCD uses the anonymous NCEI Access Data Service dataset local-climatological-data, reusing GHCN station discovery, pagination, and CSV chunking, with ten stations per asset instead of fifty because hourly rows are wide. Require both dates and either stations or a location/bbox, not both. units is metric (default) or standard; unknown parameters and text queries are rejected.

Station ids are the eleven-digit LCD identifiers the search service returns, such as 72353013967 for Oklahoma City's Will Rogers World Airport: a five-digit WMO index followed by a six-digit WBAN number. Other forms such as 13967 or the GHCN id USW00013967 are accepted by the service but return a header with no rows, so use a geographic query to discover the exact ids.

Dates select whole calendar days, and every row's DATE is the station's local standard time without an offset, not UTC. A day of observations is typically sixty rows: REPORT_TYPE distinguishes hourly METAR reports (FM-15), special reports (FM-16), synoptic reports (FM-12), the daily summary (SOD), and, at month end, the monthly summary (SOM). Filter by report type before aggregating, and expect REPORT_TYPE values to carry trailing spaces. Without variables every row carries 125 columns; naming variables such as HourlyDryBulbTemperature or DailyPrecipitation keeps only those, plus the station, date, report type, and source columns. Values can carry quality suffixes such as s and precipitation can be T for trace, so coerce numbers explicitly. Consult the LCD documentation for each field's unit under units=metric and its flags.

uv run usdata fetch noaa:lcd -p stations=72353013967 \
  --start 2024-05-06 --end 2024-05-06 \
  --vars HourlyDryBulbTemperature,HourlyPrecipitation --dry-run

The hourly observations example compares hourly readings with the daily summary for the same station. NCEI revises LCD as reports are quality-controlled.

The hourly anomalies example compares routine reports with hourly normals in local standard time, using an explicit ten-minute matching tolerance rather than treating reports as hourly means.

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.

See the service research notes for dated upstream probes.

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.

  • Updates, terms, and resolution: the NCEI dataset record, whose maintenance frequency is monthly and whose use constraint is only "cite this dataset when used as a source", so the entry uses the agency, product, and access form for citation.
  • Variables: the LCD documentation and the columns this guide names, with the units returned under units=metric. Every row carries 125 columns, so the list is a sample.
  • Latency is empty: the record states no lag between a report and its appearance.

All NOAA datasets.

Reference

noaa:lcd · Released · Included since usdata 0.14. Local Climatological Data.

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
STATION — Eleven-digit LCD station id
DATE — Report time in the station's local standard time, without an offset
REPORT_TYPE — FM-15 hourly, FM-16 special, FM-12 synoptic, SOD daily, SOM monthly
HourlyDryBulbTemperature degrees Celsius Hourly dry-bulb temperature (metric units)
HourlyPrecipitation mm Hourly precipitation; T marks a trace (metric units)
DailyPrecipitation mm Daily summary precipitation (metric units)

Catalog facts

  • Availability: since 0.14
  • Domain: Surface weather
  • Spatial resolution: Airport and first-order stations, addressed by eleven-digit station id
  • Temporal resolution: Hourly, special, and synoptic reports, plus daily and monthly summaries
  • Updates: Monthly
  • Terms of use: https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/metadata/geoportal/rest/metadata/item/gov.noaa.ncdc:C00684/html
  • Citation: NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information, U.S. Local Climatological Data, accessed via usdata
  • Coverage: not specified in the catalog
  • 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.lcd:LocalClimatologicalData