precip

This post was edited by Rita Freuder on Dec, 2010
The Historic Climate Network, r3, used weather station data from across the continental US to make a complete dataset for about 100 years, beginning about 1895. The station data is given by state and city and does have some map clickable features. The temperatures are Fahrenheit degrees, and the precipitation is in inches. The science world uses Celsius and centimeters or millimeters.
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/r3d/ushcn/ushcn_r3.html

The ongoing data available through the present is at
http://cdiac.ornl.gov/epubs/ndp/ushcn/access.html

Go to the link "web interface". It is current to within a month or days. You specify the columns of a spreadsheet that you want, for example in this file I provide as a sample, I requested station data for Hanover, NH from 1895 to 1910 monthly for precipitation, and max and min temperatures with data flags (which indicate questionable/estimated data) Although you may have to read carefully and check more boxes to get the data you want, you get an easily usable csv file, and you may request preview plots on your browser screen that help you pick ranges of years of interest or to see long term trends - more rain or higher temperatures for example.

For the HCN data (the first link above) it is important to copy the column header info from the main page, and to label your filename with the station and state name as it is not in the file which you copy and paste from the screen. The save file option on the browser appears to give only html format and gives all the weather stations of the state, not just the one you are looking at. The column header information is:

Station number, year, Jan, Feb, Mar, Apr, May, Jun, Jul, Aug, Sep, Oct, Nov, Dec, Winter (Dec, Jan, Feb), Spring (Mar, Apr, May), Summer (Jun, Jul, Aug), Fall (Sep, Oct, Nov), and the annual average temperature (Jan-Dec). All values are in degrees F and -99.99 indicates missing data.

Here is an example of maximum temperature data 1893-1994 from Charlottesville, VA

Highly interesting. The temperatures remained roughly the same on average over the hundred year period. I have to admit I was curious about this topic and I appreciate your presentation of this data. Thank you.