World Climate Information (was: Re: Amarine question)

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