Question-and-Answer Resource for the Building Energy Modeling Community
 | 1 | initial version |
For hourly weather data that is regularly updated, I use the NOAA climate data site. It's a bit hard to navigate so I usually follow these steps:
http://www7.ncdc.noaa.gov/CDO/dataproduct
1. Select "Surface Data, Hourly Global (Over 10,000 worldwide sites)", click “Access Products”
2. Agree to the terms of WMO 40
3. Continue with SIMPLIFIED Options
4. Select the “Country” radio button and “United States”, then click “Continue”
5. Select the state of interest from the dropdown menu and click the radio button for
“Selected Stations in the state”, then click “Continue”
6. Select the station(s) of interest from the list. You may select multiple stations by Control‐click. Note that there may be multiple stations with the same name – check the period of record to find the station which includes the dates you want. Click “Continue”.
7. Enter the dates of interest. You may want to click “Select Only Obs. on the Hour”, especially if you plan to do time‐series analysis which requires records to be spaced evenly. Click “Continue”.
8. Make sure the date range on the confirmation page matches the desired date range, then check “Inventory Review” checkbox, enter your e‐mail address (use a .edu address for free access), and click “Submit Request”.
9. The request verification page will tell you that your request is processing and that you’ll get an e‐mail when your data are ready. It will also give you a URL that will point to your data files when they’re ready. You may keep this page open or just forget about it and wait for the e‐mail. The e‐mail will contain all the information you need.
10. You’ll get an e‐mail from NCDC (cdo@ncdc.noaa.gov) when your data files are ready. The e‐mail will contain links to several files. The actual data will be available in two formats:
a. DS3505 ‐ Surface Data, Hourly Global ‐ Data File (a fixed‐width text file)
b. DS3505 ‐ Surface Data, Hourly Global ‐ Web File (an HTML table)
Either of these can be imported into Excel. The data file format and weather codes are documented at http://hurricane.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo/3505doc.txt
