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Comment by lssndrdn | Hacker News Reader

There was a thread on HN some time ago and I saved this link, which has some instructions on where to find the data and a description of the format.

ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod/readme.txt

I wanted to start a little project to process it but never got around to it.

Hope this helps.

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I've seen claims somewhere (maybe at "Watts Up with That") that no unmodified climate station data exists, that it's all been modified or corrected to adjust for something.

Is this data raw?

Well, it does exist, you just have to go back to the original sources, e.g. the meteorological organizations of the various countries, militaries, etc.

As far as I know, the position of the CRU is that they have no original unmodified raw data anymore. Don't know about NASA and NOAA.

This article claims that 3 out of the 4 datasets available, the ones from the CRU, NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and National Climate Data Center Global Historical Climate Network (NCDC GHCN), are not independent and that the latter two were felt by NASA to be inferior to the CRU's. The article doesn't have anything on the raw data, however.

http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/climategate-stunner-nasa-heads-...

The NOAA data is exactly what I was looking for.

Of course, it's only the U.S., and it's only for the past 80 years or so. But the dataset looks clean.

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