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The Aggregate: Environmental Data

Northwestern celebrates Earth Month virtually throughout April by engaging the Northwestern community in issues around sustainability. In honor of Earth Day tomorrow, Anne Zald, Northwestern’s Social Science Data Librarian, has selected three resources to share highlighting environmental and climate data.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: National Centers for Environmental Information is the world’s largest provider of weather and climate data. Land-based, marine, model, radar, weather balloon, satellite, and paleoclimatic are just a few of the types of datasets available.

National Weather Service Cooperative Observer Program was established in 1890 under the Organic Act. The COOP has more than 8.700 volunteers who take observations of meteorological data, usually daily maximum and minimum temperatures, snowfall, and 24-hour precipitation totals, at their locations in urban and suburban areas, National Parks, seashores, and mountaintops.

UN Environment Programme Environmental Data Explorer contains more than 500 different variables, as national, subregional, regional and global statistics or as geospatial data sets (maps), covering themes like Freshwater, Population, Forests, Emissions, Climate, Disasters, Health and GDP. Display them on-the-fly as maps, graphs, data tables or download the data in different formats.

Visit our website to learn more about social science data services, or contact Anne directly at datalibrarian@northwestern.edu.