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"Assessing the past, predicting the future and delivering a local perspective on global climate today."
Our Vision
An engaged, responsive NWS that delivers state-of-the-art, timely, and reliable climate information and decision support services to help the Nation address environmental impacts.
Our Mission
To ensure NWS has the capacity to develop and deliver reliable climate services integrated with weather and water information through user engagement, policy development, data stewardship, incorporation of research into operations, training, education, and outreach in collaboration with partners.
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weather.gov 
ACIS is a custom-designed interface which provides NOAA personnel with access to historical and near real-time climate data products through a suite of standard climate analyses via the Internet. This tool relieved individual WFOs of database maintenance and provided a central set of tools upon which to receive new products, tools, and services. This data mining tool allows internal NOAA staff to conduct historical data analyses on all stations (COOP and ASOS) that have 1971-2000 normals (several thousand stations nationwide). A huge improvement resulting from the use of xmACIS is that there is now a single validated database replacing the multiple databases and the inherent inconsistencies.
NOWdata makes a limited amount of climate data available. NOWdata is a self-service climate data tool, based on a portion of the same ACIS climate data base that also feeds xmACIS. Free public access is available from the NOWData tab on every NWS WFO climate page found through http://www.weather.gov/climate. Users can access a wide range of climate products for nearly 3,900 locations nationwide. Daily past weather is available for the last two years with climate averages for the standard 30-year period (1971-2000) and extremes for the entire record. NOWData greatly increases the public’s ability to quickly acquire climate data that previously would require significant effort to locate and obtain.
The ThreadEx project provides consistent data sets for calculating historical daily extremes of temperature and precipitation at 261 large metropolitan areas (LCD sites) frequently cited to the public by both the media and NOAA. It addresses the challenge of how to treat the inevitable fragmentation of station information over time due to station relocations. The period of record for any location will be extended as far back as possible using the currently active station. Other stations in the region are then used to extend the “thread” further back in time using NOAA data in digital form. Thus, an “authorized” threaded station ‘s record is established for daily extremes for media purposes, but not for research.
