My ice warning light came on in the car yesterday, as it does whenever the temperature is 37ºF or less. It occurred to me that very soon the light will come on every time I drive. That got me to thinking…
Is there a website that graphically tracks temperature data for specified locations? For example, can I put in Bellingham, WA and see a graph of temperatures for the month of January 2008? Or Los Angeles for August 2010?
Weather Underground will do this. Go to wunderground.com, click “History Data” under “Local Weather,” give it your location, and then choose the time period.
Wunderground has a number of really nice capabilities. Plug your zip into wundermap, zoom in until you spot your house and watch the variable opacity radar images to determine within a minute when it’ll start raining.
I don’t know where you looking, so let me try this from the top.
From the Wunderground main page, enter your zip code.
Once you get the current weather page, scroll down until you see “Weather Stations” and select a station near you.
You should now have a page that says “History for xxx” where xxx is the name of the station you picked.
Look just below the date and just above where the data starts. There is a line that says Daily, Weekly, Monthly, Yearly.
I love that Wunderground. Someone 1/2 a mile from my house has a weather station that they link to Wunderground. Other than buying my own equipment, you can’t get much more local than that.
home stations to be accurate need to be sited correctly. depends on the instrument as to where it should be, a rain gauge might be OK about 20 feet from your house, a wind gauge would have to be higher or a few dozen feet away. trees and other obstructions also affect measurements.
website reporting home weather stations are best if you look at a few surrounding ones.
Too many trees here for an anemometer. Maybe I’ll build a weather station in a few years, just for the hobby. There’s a reporting weather station fewer than four miles from my house.
NOAA (the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric, um, Administration, I think) has weather data available for download in a bewildering variety of formats, some of which are free and some aren’t. Probably only worth exploring if you’re going to need data regularly, but it’s there.