National Climatic Data Center — available to everyone!
If you seek reliable climate data, look no further than the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). With a digital archive that boasts six petabytes of data collected from ships, balloons, weather stations, radar, satellites, and other far-out places, the NCDC provides a wealth of information for interested citizens and serious researchers alike.
Marine biology, meteorology, and ocean engineering students may be particularly interested in the NCDC’s Marine/Ocean Data section, which collects global meteorological data including historical and current observations, sea surface temperature analyses, blended sea winds data and animations, GIS maps, and a whole lot more.
Going on vacation? Planting a garden? Find U.S. Climate Normals and Freeze/Frost data for your U.S. location in the Climate of the U.S. section. Links to International data include the Global Observing Systems Information Center, World Data System, World Meteorological Organization, and Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change sites. See? There really is something for everyone here!
Find the NCDC online at ncdc.noaa.gov, and if you’d like still more, find the National Climatic Data Center Online Document Center, a collection of valuable and hard-to-find information, in the Evans Library’s A to Z Databases. As always, if you need help, Ask a Librarian!
