It is so important to properly plan prior to heading out to explore. Mother Nature can, at times, go from mild mannered to angry and stormy in very little time. Thankfully, I have not had an experience where I set out to hike or explore and was taken off-guard by a storm or violent weather. I DID intentionally set out to canoe and camp at the leading edge of a hurricane when I was young with my Girl Scout troop, but I had unwavering faith in the adult leaders that let us move forward with our summer camp plans that nothing bad would happen. Being a grown up now, I think maybe they were more hoping nothing bad would happen instead of being very informed and sure nothing bad would happen.
The first website I accessed, the NOAA NCEI site for obtaining past climate and weather data, was not intuitive for me. I input the "Buffalo Mountain Natural Area Preserve" as the place I was looking for past data, and the site came back with "No stations were found for the selected location." I tried using the Access Data button on the page and was brough to a list of Specs and Features, Featured Datasets, links to different tools such as NOAA OneStop and Launch Data Access. I clicked through a few of the options but was not completely sure I knew what to ask to pull up from the databases.
I attempted to search data products for environmental images from Geo-stationary satellites and was met with another whole host of options in the below photo on the right side in blue:
I eventually clicked around until I found a search bar requesting the NWS stations I wanted to retrieve data from and I input "Willis, VA Floyd County". I was again provided a series of data products and chose one for "Precipitation". When asked for the date range, I wanted to go back 10 years to present day, but it appeared the year was selected and I could not change it (2010). I then requested the precipitation data for the entire year of 2010 from the nearest weather station and was kind of impressed when I immediately received a receipt of data request and then, 2 minutes later, my data e-mailed directly to me. I was very impressed until I tried to open the file after download and it was clearly a series of numerals and location info in lat/long but not in a spreadsheet, just in a .pdf document. It was impossible for me to understand the results of that particular data pull. I am not saying using NOAA/NCEI is bad, but if you are a beginner, it might not be the most intuitive way to determine how to get a good data pull that is easily understandable.
I continued rooting through the NOAA NWS websites and found a link to gather past climate and weather data. I selected the type of data (daily weather), the date range (1-1-2016 to 1-1-2026) by county (Floyd County, VA) and when I clicked "Continue", it took me to the same page previously used (NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information) and I placed another data order and requested it in text this time. The website for the climate data ordering can be found here: https://www.weather.gov/lot/obtain_climate The data is still challenging for a person to interpret, even in just text form. What I have learned is I have a lot to learn!
Dialing my searches in closer to "home", I found a Virginia website run by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science at William & Mary: https://www.vims.edu/ccrm/research/climate_change/data_sources/database/ There is a bit of good data on water levels, temp changes, aquatic life numbers, forest hardwood and softwood numbers, droughts, etc that can be found on this site. Many of the links I clicked on from the site to look up specific types of information came back with broken links, non-compatible links, 404 Not Founds...I believe this might be a site that links to other databases kept up by federal grant funding and other institutions that may have had some disruption in service when the new administration came onboard and the data has been moved or made unavailable. Still, the site is worth checking out.
Still not convinced I found the best sources for my location, I came across "PRISM High-Resolution Spatial Climate Data for the United States: Max/min temp, dewpoint, precipitation" by asking ChatGPT for suggestions and it can be found here: https://climatedataguide.ucar.edu/climate-data/prism-high-resolution-spatial-climate-data-united-states-maxmin-temp-dewpoint?utm_source=chatgpt.com I was able to find maps compiled of years worth of data and showing precipitation trends like the 30yr January precipitation graphic depicted below:
The PRISM site so far was my favorite, easiest to understand and also had a bulk data download option for one to see the data collected during the time range.
Lastly, I took a look at a site called Daymet by NASA: https://www.earthdata.nasa.gov/data/catalog/ornl-cloud-daymet-monthly-v4r1-2131-4.1
This site too was a tad more user friendly. There is almost too much data and information to try and sift through but I was able to find a good tutorial on using the site and was able to explore to look at satellite imagery for North America and, by using their maps, I could zoom into my specific location. If I had a .kml file to upload, I was able to do that in order to receive very site specific data. There are a lot of tools, data and options available on the web. It helps to use all tutorials on each site to understand how their sites work and to know what you will receive when you request data or a bulk download.
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