Data Access

NCEI is the world’s largest provider of weather and climate data. Land-based, marine, model, radar, weather balloon, satellite, and paleoclimatic are just a few of the types of datasets available. Detailed descriptions of the available products and platforms are below.

• Quick Links
  These links provide quick access to many of NCEI's climate and weather datasets, products, and various web pages and resources.
• Land-Based Station
  Land-based, or surface, observations include temperature, dew point, relative humidity, precipitation, wind speed and direction, visibility, atmospheric pressure, and types of weather occurrences such as hail, fog, and thunder collected for locations on every continent.
• Satellite
  Geostationary and polar-orbiting satellites provide raw radiance data collected by ground stations to help monitor and predict weather and environmental events.
• Radar
  An acronym for Radio Detection and Ranging, a radar is an object-detection system that uses radio waves to determine the range, altitude, direction of movement, and speed of objects producing raw data as well as generating analysis products.
• Model
  Access to near-real-time, high-volume numerical weather prediction and global climate models and data. Looking into the past, present, and future to assist in the analysis of multidisciplinary datasets and promote interoperable data analysis.
• Weather Balloon
  Weather data from the atmosphere, beginning at three meters above the Earth’s surface. These data are obtained from radiosondes, which are instrument packages tethered to balloons that transmit data back to the receiving station.
• Marine and Ocean
  Meteorological data transmitted from ships at sea, moored and drifting buoys, coastal stations, rigs, and platforms. The data may include weather as well as ocean state information.
• Paleoclimatology
  Past climate and environmental data, derived from natural sources such as tree rings, ice cores, corals, and ocean and lake sediments, extend the archive of weather and climate back hundreds of millions of years.
• Severe Weather
  Archive of destructive storm or weather data and information, which includes local, intense, and damaging events such as thunderstorms, hailstorms, and tornadoes. It can also describe more widespread events such as tropical systems, blizzards, nor’easters, and derechos.