Data rescue at the National Climatic Data Center

As part of NOAA’s Environmental Data Rescue Program (EDRP), the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) has been conducting several data rescue projects. One project has been completed, the copying of 88,000 rolls of microfilm which were within 3 years of the end of their useful life. A second project is the keying of daily observations from the cooperative observer network for the period prior to 1948. The data for the 1200 HCN stations have been keyed and the project has moved on to keying the pre-1948 daily data for the remainder of the network. Over 20,000 station months are keyed each week. A third project involves the keying of hourly precipitation data from the early 1900's for several sites. A forth project involves the imaging of the paper forms containing the hourly airways observations. Over one million pages are imaged each month, and soon the images will be available on the Web. Future projects are envisioned to include the keying of the hourly airways observations prior to 1948, imaging of the cooperative observer forms, and metadata/inventory verification.