Are Old Weather Conditions Officially Tracked?

[kyphysics]

Any official (scientific, verified) tracking of old weather conditions that one can look up? Say, I wanted to know what the weather was like in Kentucky in the city of Lexington on October 24th, 1983. Is there some kind of official recorded archive to look such information up?

 

[berkeman]

Say, I wanted to know what the weather was like in Kentucky in the city of Lexington on October 24th, 1983. Is there some kind of official recorded archive to look such information up?

There could be better resources, but as a backup you could search the newspaper archives...

 

[kyphysics]

1607? WOW! I wonder how accurate weather measurements were back then!

 

[Astronuc]

Any official (scientific, verified) tracking of old weather conditions that one can look up? Say, I wanted to know what the weather was like in Kentucky in the city of Lexington on October 24th, 1983. Is there some kind of official recorded archive to look such information up?

In the archives of weather.gov in the US.

https://www.weather.gov/wrh/climate
One can play around with date or month/year, and temperature or precipitation. Otherwise, one should find an archive newspaper from the area on that date.

An example of the almanac data for Lexington area, October 24, 1983.
From https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=lmk

 

[jim mcnamara]

This huge historical dataset has legal certification - because of the fact that legal challenges to data validity keep occurring. So you can only look at small chunks, if you want to peek without having to pay.
-- oldest continuing temperature reporting goes back to 1659

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/

Old 1880 forward :
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/21/why...shown-on-your-vital-signs-page-begin-at-1880/

 

[kyphysics]

This huge historical dataset has legal certification - because of the fact that legal challenges to data validity keep occurring. So you can only look at small chunks, if you want to peek without having to pay.
-- oldest continuing temperature reporting goes back to 1659

https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/

Old 1880 forward :
https://climate.nasa.gov/faq/21/why...shown-on-your-vital-signs-page-begin-at-1880/

Thank you. This was super helpful.

I also am surprised there isn't just some very easily accessible archive for this stuff. It can be very useful. It's like something I'd imagine Google wanting to organize/record. They practically "organize" the entire world already!

 

[Borek]

Freely accessible weather databases have a tendency to appear and disappear on the web. In the past I found at least two - none of the links I saved work now.

 

[f95toli]

Thank you. This was super helpful.

I also am surprised there isn't just some very easily accessible archive for this stuff. It can be very useful. It's like something I'd imagine Google wanting to organize/record. They practically "organize" the entire world already!

Many of the organisation that gather and handle this data are wholly or at least in part commercial. Even organisations such as the the UK Met Office (which is owned by the UK Government) are in part funded by creating custom forecasts and selling access to their historical data to various companies.
As far as I understand academic researchers can in general get access to whatever data they need, but there is no archive that the public has full access to.

I suspect there might also be competition reasons. Many weather forecasts are created by companies which spend a lot of money gathering data; they would presumably strongly object if a government funded agency suddenly published similar data for free.