NOAA Climate Data

NOAA Climate Data

NOAA CDO provides historical climate observations, weather stations, 30-year normals. Endpoints: datasets, datacategories, datatypes, locationcategories, locations, stations, data. Key datasets: GHCND (daily summaries), GSOM (monthly summaries), NORMAL_DLY (30-year daily normals). 5 req/sec, 10000 req/day. Data goes back to 1763 for some stations.

Data Model

• Datasets — collections of climate data (GHCND, GSOM, GSOY, NORMAL_DLY, NORMAL_MLY). Each has a mindate, maxdate, and datacoverage.
• Stations — individual weather monitoring sites with lat/lon, elevation, and data coverage metadata.
• Data — actual observations: temperature, precipitation, wind, etc. Queried by dataset, datatype, date range, and location.
• Locations — geographic areas (states, counties, cities, countries, ZIP codes) with location IDs used to filter stations and data queries.

Gotchas

• Pagination — default limit is 25, max 1000. Use offset and limit for paging.
• Date format — ISO 8601: YYYY-MM-DD.
• Rate limits — 5 requests per second, 10,000 per day.