Historical Polar Weather Data from 242 Arctic and Antarctic Stations

Meteorological data from 105 Arctic and 137 Antarctic weather stations, extracted from the National Climatic Data Center's Integrated Surface Hourly database. Variables include wind direction, wind speed, visibility, air temperature, dew point temperature, and sea level pressure, with temporal coverage from 1913 to 2002. The dataset, produced by NASA, is provided in tab-delimited ASCII text format with one file per station and year, accompanied by time series graphs.

Use Cases

• Analyzing long-term trends in surface air temperature and dew point temperature across polar stations.
• Studying changes in sea level pressure and surface wind patterns (direction and speed) in the Arctic and Antarctic.
• Investigating historical visibility conditions and their correlation with other meteorological variables.
• Validating and calibrating climate models using in-situ observational data from extreme environments.

Strengths

• Covers 242 distinct weather stations (105 Arctic, 137 Antarctic), providing broad spatial coverage of polar regions.
• Includes a long temporal record, with data spanning from 1913 to 2002.
• Data is supplemented with graphical visualizations of meteorological variables across the time series.

Limitations

• Conflicting metadata: one platform lists a last updated date of 2026-03 -13, while another indicates the data itself ends in 2002-12-31.
• Specific row counts, file sizes, and detailed column names are not provided across any source.

Provenance

Source

National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) Integrated Surface Hourly (ISH) database, processed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

Collection Method

Extracted meteorological observations from surface weather stations.

Time Range

1913 to 2002

Freshness

2026-03-13 01:28:23.691489

Geography

Arctic and Antarctic regions.