NCDC Website Privacy Policy

If you visit our site...

We may collect and store information for statistical purposes. For example, we may count the number of visitors to the different sections of our site to help us make our site more useful to visitors. You do not have to give us personal information to visit our site. If you do nothing during your visit but browse through the website and read pages, we will gather and store certain information about your visit automatically. This information does not identify you personally.

If you send E-mail or order data:

By sending us an electronic mail message, you may be sending us personal information (e.g., name, address, E-mail address). We may store the name and address of the requester in order to respond to the request or to otherwise resolve the subject matter of your E-mail. If you order weather data, we will enter the information you submit into our electronic database. This information will be used to fill your request and ship your data. In limited circumstances, including the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), we may be required by law to disclose information you submit.

We recommend that you do not use E-mail to submit credit card information to NCDC. Visit NCDC Security Issues to learn more about credit card security on our website.

The NCDC firewall

For SITE SECURITY purposes and to ensure that this service remains available to all users, this Government computer system employs software programs to monitor network traffic to identify unauthorized attempts to upload or change information, or otherwise cause damage.

The use of "Cookies"

A cookie is a small amount of information saved to your hard disk by your browser as requested by the server. Cookies are used extensively throughout most web sites (especially e-business sites) for relating shopping cart entries to specific machines. Since the web is a stateless entity, a method is needed to track items added to an individual's shopping cart. Cookies are the method that NCDC uses to accomplish this. The cookies the NNDC and NCDC set consists of a random number that identifies only the machine, not any personal information about the individual. Per Department of Commerce regulations, these cookies are non-persistent cookies meaning that they are deleted immediately after the items are purchased or whenever the customer closes their browser. NCDC does not maintain a historical database of cookies nor does it use cookies to profile customers. If you wish to order data through the online store at the discounted price, your PC must be set to accept cookies. Otherwise, you may contact NCDC for other ordering options.

We want to be very clear...

Regardless of the information being transmitted to NCDC, we will protect all such information consistent with applicable law. We will not obtain personally-identifying information about you when you visit our site, unless you choose to provide such information to us.

NCDC Website Disclaimer Statement

NCDC may provide links to web pages which are not part of the NCDC web family. These sites are not under NCDC control, and NCDC is not responsible for the information or links you may find there. We are providing these links only as a convenience. The presence of these links on any NCDC website is not intended to imply NCDC endorsement of that site, but to provide a convenient link to relevant sites which are managed by other organizations, companies, or individuals.

Data Timeliness: As a Global Data Center, NCDC makes every effort to update the dataset/product on this site as soon as possible, but does not guarantee updates on a daily basis, due to many "upstream" issues beyond our control. Therefore, when the posting of data is running behind our normal schedule, you may assume that problems resulted in a delay in the online data update. We will continue to make every effort to update our online data/products as soon as possible.

Data Quality: Data contained in Integrated Surface Data and other NCDC datasets are received via numerous sources. Though a great deal of quality control is performed, some errors will remain in the data, often due to problems in data transmission by each station location. As time and resources permit, errors will be corrected in the historical data, but a 100% correction rate is not possible. However, a very large number of errors are removed prior to users having access to the data.

Also, for users comparing data to other sources: You may find differences in one source (eg, from a national agency) vs NCDC's data. This can be due to numerous reasons, and often is the result of the original transmission of the data which NCDC or its partner agencies received - ie, the data we receive may not precisely match another source.

Other useful sites

US Dept of Commerce FOIA Home Page
NOAA Privacy Notice

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