NOAA Global Historical Climatology Network Weather Data

NOAA’s Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) is an integrated database of climate summaries from land surface stations across the globe that have been subjected to a common suite of quality assurance reviews. Two GHCN datasets are available in BigQuery, the GHCN-D (daily) and the GHCN-M (monthly). The data included in the GHCN datasets are obtained from more than 20 sources, including some data from every year since 1763.

For a complete description of data variables available in this dataset, see NOAA’s readme.txt.

You can start exploring the GHCN-D and GHCN-M in the BigQuery console.

Go to NOAA GHCN Dataset (daily)

Go to NOAA GHCN Dataset (monthly)

Sample queries

Here are some examples of SQL queries you can run on this data in BigQuery.

Find weather stations close to a specific location

In this case, we are searching for stations close to Chicago (latitude=41.88, longitude=-87.63).

SELECT
  id,
  name,
  state,
  latitude,
  longitude
FROM
  [bigquery-public-data:ghcn_d.ghcnd_stations]
WHERE
  latitude > 41.7
  AND latitude < 42
  AND longitude > -87.7
  AND longitude < -87.5

Only the top ten results are shown here:

Daily rainfall amounts at specific station

Here, we are obtaining rainfall (in mm) for all days in 2015 from a weather station in Chicago whose id is provided in the query (the station corresponds to O’Hare airport).

SELECT
  wx.date,
  wx.value/10.0 AS prcp
FROM
  [bigquery-public-data:ghcn_d.ghcnd_2015] AS wx
WHERE
  id = 'USW00094846'
  AND qflag IS NULL
  AND element = 'PRCP'
ORDER BY wx.date

Only the top ten results are shown here:

Weather for the past two weeks

Pulling daily min/max temperature (in Celsius) and rainfall (in mm) for the past 14 days. Change year from 2016 if necessary in the table name.

SELECT
  date,
  MAX(prcp) AS prcp,
  MAX(tmin) AS tmin,
  MAX(tmax) AS tmax
FROM (
  SELECT
    STRING(wx.date) AS date,
    IF (wx.element = 'PRCP', wx.value/10, NULL) AS prcp,
    IF (wx.element = 'TMIN', wx.value/10, NULL) AS tmin,
    IF (wx.element = 'TMAX', wx.value/10, NULL) AS tmax
  FROM
    [bigquery-public-data:ghcn_d.ghcnd_2016] AS wx
  WHERE
    id = 'USW00094846'
    AND qflag IS NULL
    AND value IS NOT NULL
    AND DATEDIFF(CURRENT_DATE(), date) < 15 )
GROUP BY
  date
ORDER BY
  date ASC

Only the top ten results are shown here:

About the data

Dataset Source: NOAA

Category: Weather

Use: This dataset is publicly available for anyone to use under the following terms provided by the Dataset Source — http://www.data.gov/privacy-policy#data_policy — and is provided "AS IS" without any warranty, express or implied, from Google. Google disclaims all liability for any damages, direct or indirect, resulting from the use of the dataset.

Update Frequency: daily, monthly

View in BigQuery: Go to NOAA GHCN Dataset (daily) Go to NOAA GHCN Dataset (monthly)