rgortowski@a... wrote:
>
> List,
>
> This is slightly off topic, but not too much! I am modeling December 1950
> and I am interested in finding out what the weather conditions were in
> Chicago that year (read snow). Does anyone know of a website that has
> historic weather conditions?
>
Rich,
A question a weather guy can answer! What you want is the Local
Climatological Data for Chicago from December 1950. The 4 page document
will break down the weather for each day and how precipitation and snow
fell. The official observing site then was Chicago Midway Airport. There
are several ways to get the information. The easiest is from the
National Climatic Data Center in Asheville NC. The web address is:
http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/about/ncdcordering.html
There is a charge for the information for them providing a copy and
mailing it to you. There is ability to get data online, but I just
looked and it only has data from the mid-1990's on which does you no
good.
I expect the Chicago public library system, the University of Chicago
(which is where the Weather Bureau office was located at that time) and
the University of Illinois also has originals for the Climate data from
that time. For those in the far west suburbs, NIU might have them that
far back. They might not have started getting a complete collection
until they became a university in 1958. I would suggest calling
whichever is closest to you to find out where they keep their historical
government weather documents and to arrange access for you to make a
copy.
Do not call the local NWS office at Romeoville. They had the local
offices dump a lot of this data several years ago so they would force
people to go through the Climatic Data Center. We used to have a
wonderful set of data in a wall full of notebooks for the entire central
U.S. in Kansas City for a long period of time and it all disappeared
about the same time. This is mostly due to legal issues as these
documents are used all the time in court cases and are often required to
be certified. They've also digitized all this stuff so the wall of
doucments is on a few CDs.
Bill
|