Portal for GHCN Daily
GHCN Daily is a set of daily observations at weather stations around the world. It typically includes TMAX, TMIN, TAVG (less often), rainfall and wind data. There is a file for each station, typically 100-200Kb. The file is in csv (text) format, but with gzip compression. I use the R Utils program gunzip to uncompress, but there are many options. The GHCN Readme file is here.
There are over 100,000 stations, so accessing via the GHCN directory is slow, and the stations are listed by a code, so you have to look up the directory first. In this portal you can just enter a search string, and it will respond with all stations that qualify, each linked to the appropriate station file. It will show a maximum of 30, so the string needs to be fairly specific. The strings that it is searching become the information shown. It includes a country prefix (and then state for US or Can), the station name, followed by the WMO number if there is one, and then by the number of years of data, and finally the last year of data. So you can usefully put either part of the name or the WMO number in the search string. It does not parse what you supply, so it has to be an exact match to a subset of he stored string.Here is an example of a station string:
US,NE LINCOLN MUNI AP,72551,75 2022
US, Nebraska, the name, WMO=72551, 75 years of TMAX ending 2022.
The downloaded CSV file generally has TMAX, TMIN and TAVG for the selected location, with gzip compression. I have filtered the list so it will only show stations with at last a year of TMAX data. Generally if they have any T data, it will include TMAX. I plan to update the data file every month, so it should keep track of new stations etc.
An earlier version is described here: GHCN Daily portal. I think the new version is simpler to use. JUst enter a search string, click button, and then clicking on a link that appears will download the .csv.gz files.