CONTACT: Patricia Viets FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
(301) 457-5005 9/18/95
Neal Lott
704-271-4800
A report describing this year's heavy rains and flooding in California is available from the Commerce Department's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
The report, published by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) in Asheville, N.C., provides a brief review of the storms that caused the flooding, details of some of the damage, and precipitation statistics and maps. Many locations exceeded their normal amount of precipitation by 200 percent during the "wet season," which runs from October through March.
The report, by physical scientist Neal Lott and meteorologist Matthew Sittel, is available from NCDC. Telephone: 704-271-4800; fax 704-271-4876; e-mail: orders@ncdc.noaa.gov; World Wide Web Homepage: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov.
NCDC is the world's largest active archive of weather data. It maintains 455 data sets to respond to more than 143,000 requests each year. NCDC archives weather data obtained by the National Weather Service, Military Services, Federal Aviation Administration, and the Coast Guard, as well as data from voluntary cooperative observers. As operator of the World Data Center-A for Meteorology, which provides for international data exchange, NCDC also collects data from around the globe. 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 -- equivalent to 18 million pages a day -- added each day.
NCDC stores and provides information essential to industry, science, agriculture, hydrology, transportation, recreation and engineering.