Climate and Weather Resources

For the State of Virginia there are tons of helpful climate and weather resources.

The National Centers for Environmental Information, a subset of National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration offers a wide variety of historical and present climate data. You can get data by the month, historical data for normals, wind data, and data at a glance here

If you find that there is an overwhelming amount of data there and would like to start smaller, you can find a really cool tool for looking at different parameters (average temp, precipitation, drought index, and more) by state here .



Here is what that graph looks like for average temps in Virginia during the month of May from 1970 to present.

You can also down load your data in spreadsheet form. 

Another resource for drought information by state is drought.gov. This website is very intuitive and it's easy to find drought information by state or for a more specific location, as well as drought response plans and associated organizations like the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. To see the drought conditions for Virginia go here. Drought.gov also allows you to download more specific data in spreadsheet form. 

Of interest to Virginians is storm event data, as hurricane seasons can be severe. You can search the NOAA database of storm events by state or area here.  

It can also be fun to poke around the US Global Change Research Program's website. Virginia falls into the Southeast region, and if you go to this page there will be tons of helpful charts and studies on climate change factors and data, and graphics like the one below. 

For current and predicated data for more specific locations, there are Remote Automatic Weather Stations that report data from various locations.  RAWS data includes precipitation, RH, temperatire, solar radiation, wind, and more. You can find the data for the Virginia RAWS stations here. 

Other websites that I find useful for tracking local weather are wunderground.com and intellicast.com. Both of these websites provide real time, past and future satellite and radar with live action. This is useful if you are out doing field work and don't want to be caught in a storm.