NCDC Announces New On-Line Products and Services

The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) announces the availability
of three new on line services through its WWW site
(http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov):

1)  Interactive Visualization of Global Daily Data:  Located in the
'interactive visualization of climate data' area, this system
previously provided graphical analysis and data plots for U.S. climate
divisional data and National Weather Service summary of day data.
This has now been expanded to include global summary of day data for
approximately 8000 worldwide stations.  (Additional stations will be
added to the system as time and resources permit.)  This global daily
data was previously (and still is) available as ASCII data files for
1994 to present.  Now, this new system provides for graphical displays
of the most recent 18 months of data, with the latest month normally
available 5-6 weeks after the end of the data month (e.g., Oct 95
accessible in early December).  The 12 elements which can be
graphed are:

Daily means for temperature, dew point, sea level pressure, station
pressure, visibility, and wind speed.
Daily extremes for sustained wind speed, wind gust, and
maximum/minimum temperature.
Daily precipitation.
Snow depth.

The user selects a region of interest from a global map; then selects
the country (or countries) needed; and then the desired station(s),
element(s), and time period.  The system allows for either GIF or
Postscript output.  For example, you can display:

August 1995 mean daily temperature for Vostok, Antarctica.
January 1995 mean daily wind speed and temperature for Mount
Washington, New Hampshire.
Chicago's daily mean dew points for June through August 1995.
August 1995 daily rainfall for Baguio and Manila in the Philippines.
February 1995 daily snow depth for Valdez, Alaska and Blue Canyon,
California.
July 1995 daily maximum temperatures for Alert and Eureka, Canada.
November-December 1995 daily mean wind speed for London, England.


2)  Images of Hurricanes and other Storms:  Located in the 'on-line
data access' area, this system includes multiple satellite images of
all of this year's hurricanes, along with images of significant
hurricanes of previous years (e.g., Gilbert, Andrew, Hugo)--over 160
images in all.  Several other types of images are also included such as:

The first GOES-9 IR and visible images
Tornadic thunderstorms
AVHRR 'close-ups' of numerous areas
The March 1993 'storm of the century'


3)  1995-1996 Technical Reports on Weather Events, Etc:  Located in
the 'products, publications, and services' area, we have reports on:

The Blizzard of '96
Billion Dollar Weather Disasters of 1980-1996
The California flooding of last winter
Hurricane Opal
Probabilities for a white Christmas

The same page provides access to seven reports produced during 1993-
1994 covering events such as the March '93 blizzard, the 1993 Midwest
flooding, the February '94 Southeast ice storm, and July '94 flooding in
Georgia.  The reports are available as ASCII text with separate GIF
images, and as Wordperfect files.  They include discussions of the
events, climatic data tables, computer-analyzed maps of the affected
areas, satellite images, and NEXRAD images.


We encourage users to try these new products and systems, and to let
us know if you encounter any problems.

NCDC/Neal Lott
nlott@ncdc.noaa.gov
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov