Where to find 19th century weather records

[Elaine Spencer]

I'm interested in finding an online source of day by day weather records from the 1850s -- specifically, from northern and central Illinois in 1858 and 1859.

I'm working on a project in which it would be helpful to look up, for example, the high and low temperatures in Peoria on Nov. 1, 1858, whether it was a sunny, cloudy or rainy day, how much (if any) snow fell that month, etc.

I have found references to these records at the NWS site and at the National Archives site, but can't quite figure out how to use them.

Does anyone here know a quick or easy way to find these records, or the procedures for requesting them?

 

[Michael Gavan]

For illinois, anything prior to 1888 is going to be a bit of a challenge. I would expect that most of the data is still on paper and hasn't been digitized yet. Archive.gov or contacting the NWS office directly might be your best bet. At some point they would have had to look up some of this stuff themselves for various reasons and would know where to point you.

http://www.crh.noaa.gov/ilx/climate/piahist.php

For basically every digitized record in the state of illinois, go here: http://mrcc.isws.illinois.edu/CLIMATE/