Topic: Can you get several years' worth of hourly temp data somewhere online? (U.S.)

[Bushman]

And now I am going to rain on your parade.    Your local microclimate could be significantly different that your closest station from which you have derived your algorithm.  Before I got my Davis I was sure it could not be as bad as it was, but all sorts of things, even minor elevation changes  can make major differences.  And especially when you are talking about a margin of error that results in freezing pipes.

[DistFunc]

I understand completely Bushman, but keep in mind that I am not forecasting a particular night - I'm simply drawing boundaries on the "behavior" of how temperatures work. How fast they might decline in 8.5 hours, as it turns out.

Yes sure it's not the same as measurements right here, but they're only 15 miles away on fairly moderate terrain. It's not like I took or lumped in historical data from a desert, the Alps, a coastline, the Arctic, or whatever. Also don't forget that, since we're talking overnight, we can remove one thing that can otherwise make a huge difference in temperatures at a microlevel - whether the sun is shining on you (or it happens to be more cloudy over my house, than 15 miles away).

Prior to this I had no real boundaries at all, except perhaps that it had to be below freezing, of course. If I had to pluck something out of the air, it would've been 24 (as shown above), but that was known to be a total guess. Now I know it's got to be around 21 or less.

It makes a big difference here in Atlanta because we flirt with freezing temps all winter long, but it rarely gets into the low 20s or teens. (It only got to 13 or less seven times in the past 5 years.)

[Bushman]

The weather is different in your front yard compared to your backyard.  Besides, you have probably negelected to include solar mass heating etc. in your equations.

[geofb13]

Thanks very much Bushman - ok, now we see that it does indeed have hours. Sure, that kind of data can be imported easily. I use MS Access (and export stats to Excel for graphs).

Now if only we can figure out what is up with the Stations. Preferably, an actual map to each Station ID.

geofb, let us know if you can get hourly data for a long time period (years) out of NOAA/NCDC/CDO, otherwise we will assume you mis-spoke and one can't get hourly data for long periods from CDO. Which is a shame because the CDO interface looks newer and perhaps more useful. Instead we have to use the Surface Data Hourly Global, which I presume, but don't know, has access to the exact same data. Oh well.

No it looks like you're correct about the CDO interface. It doesn't appear to give you the ability for the hourly data. It still is available like you saw from the Surface Data link. That's my fault and probably partly due to the fact that NCDC had a similar looking setup a few years ago that I thought did include everything. Maybe it did and it was too much of a hassle I don't know. Once again sorry for that.

I did get a data set through the other link I posted from 2011-01-01 00:00 until 2014-12-31 23:51. The text file was 7.7Mb and it looks like the file Bushman posted as far as format. I think that station I picked was from near Athens, station number 13874.

Here's the link for the txt file I ordered in case you would like it.
http://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/orders/7278376633382dat.txt

Also sorry again for the mistake before and I can't really give you a good reason as to why the data from Atlanta Heartsfield is only available as daily through CDO. What's slightly humerous to me is that if you go through the Global Hourly Data set you see Atlanta Heartsfield as available data but the date range ends in 1972.