Surface Weather Observations

The Surface Weather Observation Collection consists primarily of hourly, synoptic, daily, and monthly forms submitted to the archive by the National Weather Service (formerly the U.S. Weather Bureau). Other groups, including the U.S. military and local and state governments have also submitted surface weather observations that are part of this collection. All data within the collection consist of tabulated observations at designated land stations. Observations usually include temperature, precipitation, sky conditions, pressure, and other atmospheric phenomena.

Subsets of the collection have been scanned and made available as digital images upon request (see associated resources). These subsets are generally broken down into finer time scale (for example, monthly vs hourly observations) or by a specific time period (for example, pre-1948).