NOAA U.S. Climate Gridded Data: Monthly and Daily Temperature and Precipitation

NOAA's NClimGrid provides four climate variables—maximum, minimum, and average temperature, and precipitation—on a 5x5 kilometer grid for the Continental United States. Monthly data is available from 1895 to the present, while a derivative daily product (EpiNOAA) provides county-scale data from 1951 onward. The data is derived from the GHCN-D dataset and is updated with preliminary and final versions on defined schedules.

Use Cases

• Modeling long-term climate change trends based on monthly temperature and precipitation grids from 1895.
• Analyzing daily weather impacts on agriculture using county-scale temperature and precipitation data.
• Validating regional climate models against observed gridded temperature and precipitation data.
• Studying extreme weather event frequency and intensity using the historical daily time-series.

Strengths

• Provides a continuous monthly climate record for the Continental U.S. spanning from 1895 to the present.
• Offers a derivative daily product (EpiNOAA) with four weather parameters packaged into a single time-series file.
• Data is available via multiple access modes, including an R package and web interface for customized extraction.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count and dataset size are unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.

Provenance

Source

NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration)

Collection Method

Derived from the GHCN-D dataset.

Time Range

Monthly: 1895-present. Daily (EpiNOAA): 1951-present.

Freshness

Monthly data is updated annually with final versions; daily data is updated every 3 days with preliminary data and replaced with quality-controlled data every three months.

Geography

Continental United States.