Jim, I shall reveal my secrets, but only because I so enjoy your signature line comments. My first choice website is the World Climate website <http://www.worldclimate.com/>. The person who made this apparently had access to a large amount of digitized weather data from all over the world and made this website. Since then he has been, in his free time, planning to update it with a lot of newer/better/additional weather and climate data, etc. But he is apparently a very busy guy and has been planning to put all this updated and increased data online soon for several years now. It's still the most comprehensive site available for free IMO even without the anticipated updates. As he warns, you have to enter the city name in what you think is the transliteration for place names in non-Latin alphabet countries, and in non-English countries you need to enter the place name as it is written in that country. (Important for places like Italy.) Once you get a successful hit, you will be given all the possible locations he has data for that fall in the same 1° X 1° lat./long. quadrant as the city you were looking for. Then he has a neat little navigation device that allows you to move to the adjacent 1° X 1° lat./long. quadrant in any of the 8 compass directions from the quadrant you're in. In this way, you can "step" through all possible data available in a larger geographic area. I just get out my big atlas (I have a National Geographic Atlas, but the [London] Times World Atlas is also a good one), and follow along to see where the locations lie on the map. Sometimes, even a big atlas doesn't have the locations for some of the station locations. In those cases, another of my useful websites is the Global Gazetteer <http://www.fallingrain.com/world/> that allows you to track down the location, on a nice topo map, of virtually any city or town in any country in the world. My second weather 'site, especially useful for major cities in third world countries that the World Climate 'site often has much less data of, is the World Weather Information Service sponsored by the WMO <http://www.worldweather.org/>. It is especially good for finding the long term average monthly maximum and minimum temperatures of major towns in third world countries. The max and min temperatures are often missing in the World Climate database. (They seemed to be most interested in a single daily average temperature which isn't very useful IMO.) Thirdly, on the individual country 'pages in the World Weather Information Service 'site, they will have a link to that country's national weather service website. Each country does things its own way, and usually in its own language. (Although quite a number will provide an 'English' option as well. But it seems that Spanish-speaking countries, like all of Latin America!, are much less apt to do this.) So these 'sites may be difficult to use even if they happen to provide a lot of good data, if you can't read or understand (or figure out) that language. Some sites won't give you any data for free. Others give a limited amount. It can be hit or miss. Some give a lot if you can figure out how to look for it. If you want a linked listing of almost all the world's countries' weather service websites on one 'page, I found this Egyptian 'site that had a compiled listing of them: <http://nwp.gov.eg/arabic/members.htm>. (Maybe someone knows a better 'site?) Anyway, it's easy (for me) to get lost trolling the world for climate data, so be careful if you have a weakness in this area or you will surface hours later not realizing how much time went by. Does anyone else have any other good 'sites for (free) climate data? --Lee Poulsen Pasadena area, California, USDA Zone 10a On Oct 6, 2005, at 3:18 PM, Jim McKenney wrote: > Lee, thanks a lot -that's an impressive bundle of information. > > Now tell us how you did that! > > Jim McKenney