New weather map database online - 1961-2007

[Tim Vasquez]

I have just completed a project to place nearly 100,000 weather maps online. You can look up any calendar date going back to 1961 and see the weather on that date. All days up to 2006 have tables of highs, lows, precip, snowfall, and snow depth across the U.S.

http://www.wxhistory.com

Better yet, narratives for some of the more significant days are included. Feel free to edit the pages for some of your favorite chase days to explain what you saw, and upload an image or two if you feel like it.

I am committed to preserving this entire database regardless of anything unforeseen that happens to the site (and distributing it openly if that happens), so your changes either way will be maintained as a piece of weather history.

Enjoy!

Tim

 

[Joey Ketcham]

Wow!

Amazing! That's frickin' awesome. I can't wait to go through and look at some past events tonight when I get home from work.

 

[Tim Vasquez]

Thanks. Also as a note you can get historical maps from the NOAA U.S. Daily Weather Maps Project:
http://docs.lib.noaa.gov/rescue/dwm/data_rescue_daily_weather_maps.html

The downside is that it's not easy to navigate, it requires a proprietary plugin, you only get one 12Z upper and surface map, and there's no provision for narratives and searching. Also you don't get the 500 mb vorticity field as you do with my own site. But for going back before 1950 it can't be beat. I may end up grabbing those maps someday to fill in the content before 1961.

Tim

 

[Gabe Garfield]

Tim, do you mind if we update the narrative at the top of the event page? Tornado history is my thing, so I would love to add tidbits about the big events.

Gabe

 

[Tim Vasquez]

I -encourage- editing of the narrative page. However right now I am rebuilding all of the index pages to make them more compatible with people dropping images into the articles, so you should hold off for about a day or two before editing any entries.

Tim

 

[Jeff Miller]

This is an absolutely awesome resource for the true weather enthusiast - amateur or professional.

It is great to be able to log in to the site, with the opportunity not only to look up weather of personal or public historic memory, and see the conditions that caused that memory of your childhood, and other specific events of the past. It is also a great tool for basic hand analysis - granted,not extensive data, but certainly one can input basic surface features as fronts, etc, on your own time with the image. \

The wiki format gives anyone with a good knowledge and history of weather events to communicate these events to the public - and could prove to turn this site into one of the most educational weather history sites on the internet. That potential can only be realized if we as users take the time to input the information. This will give true weather hobbyists something to do on rainy days or late nights for certain.

It would be cool to animate the images in yearly files to actually "watch" the weather change day by day. - that in itself would be fascinating to watch.

Big kudos to Tim for taking the time and effort in a busy lifestyle to create this timeless meteorological treasure.