ClimateStations.com Introduction

ClimateStations.com – Descriptive Climatological Graphs and Charts for Twelve Major Metropolitan Area Weather Stations Distributed Across the United States

Climatestations.com was initially created to present graphically on a year-to-year basis, the remarkably lengthy and 99.6 percent intact daily maximum/minimum temperature history for Minneapolis-St. Paul MN, dating back to 1820, now 201 years in length.  Also included, subject to  availability for MSP, were depictions of daily precipitation, snowfall, and snow depth observations.

From this start, eleven additional U.S. stations, all with climatic histories at least 70 years in length have been added over time (New York Central Park, Chicago, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Portland, Las Vegas, Miami, Seattle, and in 2021, Phoenix and Dallas-Fort Worth).  With so much data from so many stations being presented, the focus is necessarily visual, and the goal is to construct the individual-year visualizations to be interesting, informative, and visually appealing. 

Other climate variables, such as wind (mean vector, mean scalar; extremes) and relative humidities, etc.,) have been introduced, one important graphic-type being “hour-by-month climograms”, portraying given stations’ diurnal/seasonal variabilities (means, percent frequencies, extremes, etc.)  for various parameters, individually, represented on single-page grid-layouts analogous to topographic maps. Further graphics’-type additions have been annual time series plots (for example, those of annual mean temperatures or annual total precipitation), cumulative season-to-date totals of precipitation, probability density distribution charts (e.g., those of annual total precipitation) and, analyses and depictions of diurnal resultant wind patterns, a result of clustering analyses. The selection of parameters, kinds of analyses, and graphics’ types utilized are always subject to expansion, assuming any new proposed additions are considered novel, worthwhile and interesting.

The charts can be perused by teachers, students, planners, decision makers, and general weather enthusiasts – for some specified purpose(s), or simply for their own sake. As mentioned above, the primary focus is visualization, but raw supporting data are usually available upon request.

Charts pertaining to the current year in question are updated on a semi-weekly to semi-monthly basis. Public data sources are utilized to acquire the raw data, with attributions given, and generation of the assorted in climate statistics and creation of their graphical depictions done on an original, “in-house” basis.

Most of the traffic (~90%)  to Climatestations.com comes from domestic visitors, but plans are also in place to add a few foreign stations as well (for example, Helsinki, Finland).