Coastal Oregon Weather Data - Or Anywhere for that matter (Bend: zip code, airports)

[CRC2020]

I see a lot of questions on weather in Coastal Oregon. I had the same sort of questions. The majority of weather websites gives you the same average weather data for an area regardless of location. And everyone on the coast knows that going 20 miles inland can make a huge difference. For the better or the worse.

Then I found:

https://www.climate.gov/maps-data/da...ode-data-table

You can search by zip code, request the daily summaries, make sure you get the geographical location, and you can download daily (for the most part) weather data over a number of years for a very specific location that you can find on Google maps by copying and pasting the GPS coordinates.

And each zip code can have multiple weather stations, some located quite close to each other, but cover different date ranges or have different measurements. I actually found a weather station 1/2 mile from a prospective property providing rain and temperature data. But only one!

By getting the raw data in CSV tables you can open directly in Excel and then scan down the days looking at things like temperature max and min, precipitation, snow, snow depth and a host of other potentially interesting weather data. And be able to scan over several years noting rainy days, misty days and really rainy days. Graphing in excel can provide a visual pattern that can be quite revealing and informative.

HOWEVER, not all weather stations provide all data. Some only provide temperature. Some provide only precipitation. Some, mainly at airports like North Bend, provide a lot of different types of data. You just have to play around with the data requests and the data itself to find what would be of interest to you.

The one missing piece of data is related to cloud cover. I have found several different sites professing to provide cloud cover information, but unfortunately I have found them to be lacking. For example, Coos Bay, with the marine layer, is going to be far more cloudy than say, Elkton, but most of the cloud cover data is copy and pasted.

I have found Direct Solar data from a variety of sites that appears to address the cloud cover issue indirectly, but the climate site above does not provide that type of data for most sites. If anyone has any suggestions, I am open to trying it out!