This project analyzes historical weather data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) to calculate temperature statistics and create visualizations comparing record temperatures, 30-year averages, and actual daily temperatures for Bloomington, IN, 1999.
- Course: ATMS 523 (Atmospheric Sciences)
- University: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIUC)
- Student: Zachary Torstrick
- Semester: Fall 2025
- Assignment: Module 3 Project
Developed a function get_ghcn_station_stats() that:
- Downloads GHCN Daily weather data from Amazon Web Services
- Calculates record high and low temperatures for each calendar day
- Computes 30-year average high and low temperatures (1991-2020 period)
- Returns a pandas DataFrame with temperature statistics by day of year
Created a Bokeh plot that displays:
- Record Range: Historical extremes (light blue shaded area)
- Average Range: 30-year climate normals (medium blue shaded area)
- Actual Temperatures: Daily observations for a specific year (dark blue bars)
- Source: National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI), NOAA
- Dataset: GHCN Daily Data
- Access Method: Amazon Web Services S3 bucket
- URL:
s3://noaa-ghcn-pds/csv/by_station/ - Citation:
Menne, M.J., I. Durre, R.S. Vose, B.E. Gleason, and T.G. Houston, 2012: An overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 29, 897-910, doi:10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00103.1
- Temperature Units: Tenths of degrees Celsius (converted to degrees Celsius in analysis)
- Time Period: Historical data from 1900s to 2020
- Elements: TMAX (maximum temperature), TMIN (minimum temperature)
- Quality Flags: M_FLAG, Q_FLAG, S_FLAG for data quality assessment
- Primary Station: USC00120784 (Bloomington, Indiana University)
- Location: Bloomington, Indiana, USA
- Station Type: University weather station
- Data Availability: Varies by element and time period
This project is for educational purposes as part of ATMS 523 coursework at UIUC.
Last updated: October 2025