Yuchuan Lai

Long-term city-specific temperature and precipitation records

• Daily historical records of over 200 U.S. cities starting at least from 1900 are provided
• Records of single or multiple National Weather Service stations were used for each city
• Annual temperature and precipitation indices including extreme events were calculated

Climate and climate change at different locations and regions can be different. Assessment of regional climate change, especially at individual cities, is crucial for infrastructure engineering. The evaluation of location-specific regional climate records provides detailed information about climate variability and observed climate change. Many cities in the United States have archived daily temperature and precipitation records from as early as the 1870s and such records can provide valuable information of relatively long-term regional climate change.
The long-term historical climate records for cities in the contiguous United States were therefore compiled and assessed in this work. Daily maximum and minimum temperature and daily precipitation were acquired from Applied Climate Information System (ACIS), developed by the NOAA Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC). The weather stations used for each cities were based on NRCC’s “ThreadEx” project (Owen et al. 2006).

The discussions about the regression analyses of the datasets can be found in Lai, Y. and D.A. Dzombak. 2019: Use of Historical Data to Assess Regional Climate Change. Journal of Climate, 32, 4299–4320, https://doi.org/10.1175/JCLI-D-18-0630.1. The raw daily and annual datasets can be downloaded at https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/7890488.v5 and https://doi.org/10.1184/R1/7961012.v5..

Interactive plots for city-specific climate Change

The interactive graphs below present some of our results on the assessment of long-term temperature and precipitation records at different U.S. cities.
It may take up to a minute for the graphs to be loaded. View the webpage with the desktop version is recommended.

Acknowledgement The research was supported by a Carnegie Mellon College of Engineering Dean’s Fellowship to Yuchuan Lai, and by the Hamerschlag Chair of Professor Dzombak.