GIS Climate Data

[Dustin Wilcox]

I am in search of many forms of Climate data that is in a format suitable for GIS programs such as ARCMAP. Searching google and browsing the web I found some decent data at the NOAA website but files are locked in some .tar format that I guess requires special software and computers to extract. I am especially in search of shapfiles with Tornado data by year, or even better monthly, as at this time it is the only data I am struggling to find; but I also could put to use more precipitation and all severe weather data as well. If anyone knows of where this data for the plains region can be found please provide me with some links.

 

[Van DeWald]

You might try this source:

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ind/?n=svrgis

 

[Dan Cook]

Dustin,

download WinRar and you can open those files.

 

[Mike McDonald]

Other weather specific sources to try:

http://www.weather.gov/gis/

http://gis.ncdc.noaa.gov/aimstools/gis.jsp

http://www.nohrsc.noaa.gov/archived_data/

These are non-weather specific sites that provide climate data:
http://www.geodata.gov
http://www.nationalmap.gov
http://nationalatlas.gov

Mike

 

[Dustin Wilcox]

Dustin,

download WinRar and you can open those files.

Thanks a ton, I talked to a professor today who made it sound like there was nothing I could really do to get that data extracted, but that program worked. Thanks for the other links as well.

 

[tom hanlon]

Tar

Tar stands for Tape Archive. It is a collection of files. It is a standard Unix format.

Winrar might be a solution but a Mac should just be able to deal with it and any unix/linux machine will also deal with it.

It never hurts to look at the tar file.
tar tvf file.tar

Extract it
tar xvf

Another format that you may encounter is a compressed tar file.
These will be tar.gz or sometime tgz
You can have more than one dot in a filename in linux/unix so
filename.tar.gz is common.

To mess with these on windows i am sure there are many tools out there. Once you know what to look for.

Try "tarball" Gzip, gnuzip, untar and the like for a google search for the windows tools.

Of course you should abandon windows and install linux.. but until then ..

There actually is a windows collection of tools for unix sysadmins. Search MS site for it. It should have a shell and basic utilities.

--
Tom