Easy access to 106 years of climate data is now available at a new Web site just launched by NOAA. Sky-blue buttons can quickly give you access to temperature and precipitation data for the entire USA, including all regions, the 48 contiguous states and 40 cities. With one click, graphs and tables provide data for any month or season from
1895 to the present.

The new Web site can tell you whether a bitterly cold winter is really the coldest ever recorded in U.S. history, or whether it's ever been drier in the Southern Plains, or what the data show about U.S. temperature patterns. The interactive site lets you tailor the questions and create your own maps, graphs and tables.

The site was created by NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C., the world's largest active archive of weather and climate data. The center has more than 150 years of data on hand. This includes satellite weather images back to 1960, with 55 gigabytes of new information added each day—equivalent to 18 million
pages a day. The Web site's address is http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/usclimate.html.