Topic: How to best determine historical weather at point between stations?

[adlib13]

Hello -

I just bought a piece of land on a ridgeline and am excited to build a house on it. For the design of the home, I'm hoping to get an accurate sense of historical temperature, wind speed, and wind direction on this ridgeline. However, there's no weather station on the ridge! And even if I were to install one, it would only yield me a bit of data before I need to finalize the design.

Fortunately, there are two nearby weather stations: One down on the beach below the ridge, and one higher up the ridge behind the property.

How can I look at annual weather graphs for these stations, or download each of their full data so that I can make my own plots comparing the two locations? Anecdotally, the beach is windier and perhaps hotter? than up on the ridge but I'd love a more exact idea of how this changes through the seasons.

Beach: KCAPACIF185 https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KCAPACIF185
Ridge: KCAPACIF97 https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/KCAPACIF97

Perhaps there is a different technique that allows me to view annual / monthly historical weather for any arbitrary forecast point on a map? The property is approx at 37.60405, -122.496. I was worried that this region outside of San Francisco has too much variation in microclimates from one part of town to the next (anecdotally this is definitely true) to just use the generalized historical weather for the town of Pacifica.

Thanks for any help!

[sky_watcher]

Fortunately, there are two nearby weather stations: One down on the beach below the ridge, and one higher up the ridge behind the property.

How can I look at annual weather graphs for these stations, or download each of their full data so that I can make my own plots comparing the two locations? Anecdotally, the beach is windier and perhaps hotter? than up on the ridge but I'd love a more exact idea of how this changes through the seasons.

You can get the data for these stations a month at a time quite easily and then splice them to get a year's worth, although the beach site only appears to have data for a couple of weeks a month in January and February 2020 - didn't look at the other months.

Looking at Google, the beach site is at 10', the other site you mentioned is 476'. Your site is about half way between them height wise, but about the same distance to the higher site as the beach site is to it. From just the names on the map, there is another ridge on the on the side of the beach location (Pedro Point Headlands, etc), there may be a bit of a gully behind the beach site. This would make attempting to interpolate between the two WU sites to get accurate information about your site unreliable.

It seems unlikely that you get the resolution that you are seeking, as the distance between the points is less than a mile. If you look at the NWS graphical forecasts for the Linda Mar Blvd / Fassier Avenue area you will see how broad their cells are.

[Mattk]

There's so many variables in this and really not a lot of logic to come up with anything that could really be classified as meaningful?

[Bushman]

What is your end goal vis a vis the design? I can tell you that microclimate , especially temp and hum varies considerably from site to site, height  to height.  In my case there can be 5 degrees C difference in temp alone from our beach to the elevated road behind  us which is only about 150 feet as the  crow flies.

[adlib13]

What is your end goal vis a vis the design? I can tell you that microclimate , especially temp and hum varies considerably from site to site, height  to height.  In my case there can be 5 degrees C difference in temp alone from our beach to the elevated road behind  us which is only about 150 feet as the  crow flies.

My end goal is to have the best parameters to design our home for. For example, knowing average/max wind speed and direction (along with rainfall and wind-driven rain) will help us to design the front opening of the house and think about how the air will circulate which will impact thermal balance of the home, etc.

[SteveFitz1]

Don't know if this helps but it appears you may have more stations to choose from at PWSWeather.com.
https://www.pwsweather.com/local/map/us/ca/pacifica

Steve

[Bushman]

What is your end goal vis a vis the design? I can tell you that microclimate , especially temp and hum varies considerably from site to site, height  to height.  In my case there can be 5 degrees C difference in temp alone from our beach to the elevated road behind  us which is only about 150 feet as the  crow flies.

My end goal is to have the best parameters to design our home for. For example, knowing average/max wind speed and direction (along with rainfall and wind-driven rain) will help us to design the front opening of the house and think about how the air will circulate which will impact thermal balance of the home, etc.

Winter vs. summer?  All this info is already available online.  I have to wonder about your architect...

[CW2274]

I just bought a piece of land on a ridgeline and am excited to build a house on it. For the design of the home, I'm hoping to get an accurate sense of historical temperature, wind speed, and wind direction on this ridgeline.

Well, I can tell you this much, every airport in the Bay area has runway configurations that are NW to SE orientations, and runways aren't just put down willy-nilly...year or two of observations are taking before anything is laid down. That said, when I worked in the Bay, the wind was predominately out of the NW until a storm would march down the coast and then SE wind would prevail.