Climate Atlas of the United States
Now Available for Sale

Atlas CD Cover
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Overview

This CD-ROM contains version 2.0 of the Climate Atlas of the United States.  It replaces a popular paper Atlas last published in 1968, and supersedes version 1.0 of the Climate Atlas of the Contiguous United States published on CD in 2000.  The new CD Atlas contains 2023 color maps of climatic elements such as temperature, precipitation, snow, wind, pressure, etc., chosen to portray the climate of the US.  The period of record of the data for most of the maps is 1961-1990.

The user may install the Atlas onto a local drive, or run the Atlas from the CD.  From the Atlas interface, the user chooses an element type (Temperature, or Precipitation, or Snow, etc.), an element (mean, or maximum, or record extreme, etc.), and a geographic area (Lower 48, Alaska, or Hawaii).  The Atlas displays maps of the selected element and area using ESRI's ArcExplorer, which is included on the CD.  ArcExplorer provides GIS capabilities, such as zoom, query, identify, and theme layering.

The Atlas provides access to extensive help and documentation directly from its interface.  The same help and documentation are available from NCDC's Atlas Help and Atlas Documentation pages.

Additionally, the CD contains the data (in "dbf" format) used to produce the Atlas.

NOTE: Most of these maps can also be ordered individually in a high resolution Adobe PDF format, or as ESRI Shape Files. Selected maps are also available in the Selected Maps from the Climate Atlas of the Contiguous US publication.

There is an online version of the Climate Atlas viewable at no charge.

Sample maps

Lower 48 Annual Mean Daily Average Temperature; Click here for a larger image. Lower 48 Annual Mean Total Precipitation; Click here for a larger image.

Lower 48 Annual Mean Total Snowfall; Click here for a larger image. AK Annual Mean Total Precipitation; Click here for a larger image.

HI Annual Mean Daily Average Temperature; Click here for a larger image.