The National Climate Data Center (NCDC) temperature normals dataset is a fantastic resource. It's available via a handful of portal-ish tools and also FTP (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/normals/1981-2010/). To get big chunks or all of it, use FTP. The readme.txt (ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/normals/1981-2010/readme.txt) has a good break down of what's available.
The code here takes minimum, maximum and average temperature normals from the NCDC FTP server, converts it to JSON and loads it into mongo. There's also a simple node + express script to serve the data out of mongo.
The source files from the NCDC FTP server are:
- from
products/temperature(ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/normals/1981-2010/products/temperature/):dly-tmin-normal.txt,dly-tmax-normal.txt,dly-tavg-normal.txt - from
station-inventories/(ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/normals/1981-2010/station-inventories/):allstations.txt
Those files are also included in this repo in the raw/ directory.
The easiest way to use these scripts is via npm, assuming mongo is running and available on port 27017:
npm install
npm run munge
npm run load
npm run start
Once those complete, an express app will be running on port 3006. Pull out some data by going to a url like http://localhost:3006/ncdc/normals/40.2/-85.4/03-09.