Precipitation Data
Finding historical precipitation data
A lot of links were explored to find an API which would allow to download precipitation data at 6 hour intervals. It was much more complicated than that.
| No. | Links | Summary | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Dataset Overview | National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) (noaa.gov) | The link is supposed to give you historical data | Does not work. Simply shows some information on the map. |
| 2 | Search | Climate Data Online (CDO) | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (noaa.gov) | This is a web search tool to download precipitation data based on date and location. It can only retrieve data till Jan 2014. No data after that is available | Does not work. Simply shows some information on the map. Information can’t be downloaded as a csv file for further exploration. |
| 3 | Select a Location | Data Tools | Climate Data Online (CDO) | National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) (noaa.gov) | Similar tool as above | It does give data beyond 2013. The data is available only in the form of maps. |
| 4 | Index of /data/local-climatological-data/access/2021 (noaa.gov) | Directory to download all precipitation data based on station id, use CSV file sent by Jake to match station id | |
| 5 | get_ncei/isd_stations_to_use.csv at main · barrc/get_ncei (github.com) | Station id and their names | |
| 6 | Q&A about the new NCEP Stage II/Stage IV (noaa.gov) | Q&A website for Stage II and IV precipitation data, link is related to the stage IV precipitation data mentioned in competition data sheet | |
| 7 | Hourly/6-hourly Precipitation Analysis at NCEP/EMC (noaa.gov) | Stage IV precipitation data | Data is available for past 14 days but in gif or grb2 format. Not of any use for our purposes |
| 8 | GCIP/EOP Surface: Precipitation NCEP/EMC 4KM Gridded Data (GRIB) Stage IV Data - Datasets - DASH Search - PRODUCTION (ucar.edu) | Central page for finding stage IV precipitation data | Does not contain anything useful |
| 9 | AHPS Precipitation Analysis (weather.gov) | Download precipitation data in grb2 format | No location-based API present |
| 10 | AHPS Precipitation Analysis (weather.gov) | Allows you to download precipitation data in daily or hourly format | The data is downloaded in NetCDF or Geotiff format. Geotiff are images. NetCDF is a very different format |
| 11 | National Weather Service Data Download in GIS Format | Allows you to download results in GIS format |