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Long-term climate data are critically important for climate change research, but are also needed to parameterize ecological models and provide context for interpreting research study findings. Consequently, climate data are among the most frequently-requested data products from LTER sites. This fact was a prime motivating factor for development of the LTER ClimDB database from 1997 to 2002. However, direct climate measurements made at the Georgia Coastal Ecosystems LTER site (GCE) are currently fairly limited, both geographically and temporally, because our monitoring program began in 2001. Therefore, in order to put results from GCE studies into broader historic and geographic context and to support LTER cross-site synthesis projects, we rely on climate data collected near the GCE domain from an array of long-term National Weather Service stations operated under the Cooperative Observer Program. Data from NWS-COOP stations are distributed through the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, so we have periodically requested data from NCDC for these ancillary weather stations to supplement GCE data. Unfortunately, this entire process ground to a halt in April 2011 when NOAA announced that it was abandoning the traditional COOP/Daily data forms, meaning that daily summary data sets would not be available from the existing web application beyond December 2010. We clearly needed to find a new source for NWS-COOP data.

Sheldon, W.M. Jr. 2011. Mining Long-term Data from the Global Historical Climatology Network. In: LTER Databits - Information Management Newsletter of the Long Term Ecological Research Network: Fall 2011. Long Term Ecological Research Network, Albuquerque, New Mexico.