HISTORICAL WEATHER DATA SYSTEM

INSURANCE · UNIVERSITY · RESEARCH · AVIATION

ARGON™ is a dedicated Firewire hard drive loaded with billions of key weather records for North America going back to 1950. It's designed for businesses and universities that need the complete North American weather record on demand. Using the power of mySQL, you can run statistical analyses, find extremes, averages, and frequencies, and export queries in METAR and spreadsheet form. All data has been unified into a common format and is searchable by latitude/longitude, WMO, ICAO, FAA, and WBAN identifier. This ensures maximum compatibility for your projects. And ARGON™ is economical -- obtaining all of this data from the National Climatic Data Center as of 2006 would involve tens of thousands of dollars and hundreds of hours of processing time.

How ARGON™ was developed
Since 1997 Weather Graphics has been collecting and warehousing tremendous amounts of weather data. Our primary goal has always been to adapt the data for operational use, avoiding complicated or arcane storage formats. Weather Graphics has been interested in creating a superdatabase for quite some time, but only in 2005 did consumer technology allow this. Development work involved the processing of billions of weather records, 3000 lines of source code, and 400 hours of processing time on Pentium 4 computers.

MYSQL command line queries
With only one single query, here are just some of the things you can do:
  • Find the date/time of the highest 700 mb wind speed ever recorded at Minneapolis
  • See the average temperature for September 1985 in Pocatello, Idaho
  • Show all instances of winds above 60 mph at Harrisburg, Pennsylvania
  • Determine the number of hours the visibility was below 2 miles at DFW International Airport in 1990-2005
  • View the dates and times that the mercury was below 0°F in 1982 at Cleveland
  • Show all observations between 42N 100W and 44N 95W at 0400 UTC on July 8, 1996
  • Show all temperature highs and lows for October 12, 2004
    Types of weather elements available
  • Daily climatological summary - Year, month, day, hour, latitude and longitude (to nearest hundredth), WBAN (5-digit), WMO code (5-digit), ident (3-letter), daily maximum and minimum temperature, average sky cover, fastest wind speed, daily precipitation, snowfall, and snow depth. Our data includes nearly all first-order stations, not just select cooperative sites.
  • Surface hourly data - Year, month, day, hour, latitude and longitude (to nearest hundredth), WBAN (5-digit), WMO code (5-digit), FAA identifier (3-letter), ICAO identifier (4-letter), elevation, time correction (minutes), data source code, sky cover, ceiling, amount and height of up to 6 cloud layers, visibility, weather type, additional weather codes, obstruction to visibility type, severe weather type, temperature, dewpoint, wind direction, wind speed, wind gust, altimeter setting, sea level pressure, and station pressure.
  • Upper level data - Year, month, day, hour, latitude and longitude (to nearest hundredth), WBAN (5-digit), WMO code (5-digit), ident (3-letter), level (mb), geopotential height, temperature, dewpoint, wind direction, and wind speed. Due to space restrictions only mandatory-level data is provided.
  • Storm reports data - Year, month, day, hour, latitude and longitude (to nearest hundredth), state, city, and information about tornado, hail, or high wind occurrence (U.S. only)
    Statistics
    Database size is as follows:
    Data type           Records         Table size        
    Upper air 52 million 1.8 GB
    Surface 191 million 10.0 GB
    • Result of a query for hours on which the temperature exceeded 90°F at DFW Airport in May 1982. (Click to enlarge)

    Rough station count for each observation time is as follows. Only North American and a few overseas Department of Defense stations are included.
    Year       Surface
    stations    		 Upper
    stations
    1970 239 149
    1980 1126 145
    1990 1130 134
    2000 1500+ about 130

    Sources
    All data originates from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and has been reprocessed into a unified format. Sources include TD3200, TD3280, FSL's RAOB database, NOAAPORT archives, and various NCDC and UCAR records.

    Requirements
    A computer with a Firewire (IEEE 1394) port is required. MySQL installation for Windows and easy-to-follow instructions are provided. Sorry, we cannot support USB systems as the data transfer rates are far too slow.

    License
    There are no restrictions on what you do with ARGON™ output, including resale. However the actual database files and tables are copyrighted and uniquely watermarked; their duplication and distribution are expressly prohibited. We support the work of third-party developers and will announce their work on our website.

    Included support
    If/when we improve the quality of the data in ARGON™, we will provide to you free of charge a maintenance patch on a CD or DVD disc. For the lifetime of your purchase, if the ARGON™ hard drive fails, we will restore your ARGON system at no charge (does not include cost of a new hard drive, which you may either send in or purchase at street prices through us; does not include database weather updates since your purchase).

    For further information
    If you have questions about the ARGON™ system, please contact us.

    Purchase
    AR001 ARGON system - Standard license $1275.00 HIT RELOAD
    AR005 ARGON updates (lifetime)* $495.00 HIT RELOAD

    * Lifetime services will be provided on an annual basis as long as we are in business and own the rights to ARGON™, and subject to any unforeseen restrictions on public availability of data.
    ** To get the government or nonprofit rate: For governments we require shipment to a listed government entity address and a signed order on official letterhead. For nonprofits we require a copy of your organization's IRS 501(c)(3) paperwork (U.S.) or CRA proof of nonprofit status (Canada).