MADIS Meteorological Surface Dataset
Overview
Description
Surface land and maritime observing stations report various meteorological variables that describe the current weather. These variables include basic measurements such as temperature, relative humidity, wind, precipitation, etc., as well as various types of weather occurrences such as hail, fog, and thunder.
The MADIS meteorological surface dataset includes reports from many observing networks run by different "providers". MADIS provides a graphical, a surface dump, and an application interface for access to MADIS surface data. All MADIS surface interfaces provide the user the capability to subset the data several ways.
The MADIS meteorological surface dataset contains a unique collection of thousands of mesonet stations from local, state, and federal agencies, and private firms. Some of the mesonet stations are restricted. Click here for details.
Geographic Coverage
The surface dataset is global, but densest over North and Central America, plus Hawaii (METAR, maritime, CRN, mesonet, SAO - Canada only). Global datasets include maritime and METAR, along with some mesonets: APRSWXNET has a significant number of global observations, and the PCDINPE mesonet is in Brazil.
Data Schedule
Data arrive on a continuous, asynchronous schedule, and the current and previous hour's data are processed every 5 minutes. In order to get regularly-scheduled hourly reports from the standard national data sources (METAR, SAO, and maritime) these files contain data starting 15 minutes before the hour and ending 44 minutes after the hour (e.g., the 0000 file covers 2345 - 0044). With the other surface datasets, the data are segmented into hourly files, with the file for hour HH containing data for HH00 through HH59. The most complete data for a given hour is available a little after 2 hours following the file time. The user should also understand that some of the mesonet networks aren't as timely as the national data sources. The lag time of these reports (lag = time available from MADIS - observation time) ranges from about 8 to 45 minutes, and can sometimes be longer.
Data that arrive after 2 hours following the time of the observation are processed in a "data recovery" mode, where once a day batch processing is performed to reprocess data that are 35 day's, 7 day's old, and 1 day old. MADIS provides the ability for users to retrieve any dataset from the time it was first ingested by MADIS.
Volume
Typical daily volume for all MADIS datasets can be seen here.
Variable Details
- Full Meteorogical Surface
- Lists of Variables
- METAR (standard)
- SAO
- Maritime
- Climate Reference Network
- Historical Climatology Network - Modernization
- New England Pilot Project
- Mesonet/RWIS
- UrbaNet
- Quality Control Processing and Data Structures
- Variables Metadata
Most of the mesonets have all of the basic meteorogical variables (e.g., air temperature, relative humidity and/or dewpoint temperature, wind speed and direction, pressure), but only a subset of mesonets have variables such as soil temperature, etc. Also, different kinds of precipitation measurements are taken by the different mesonets.
Integrated Mesonet
National Mesonet/UrbaNet
Related Links
- Federal Meteorological
Handbook No. 1 -- Surface Weather Observations and Reports
This is the definitive United States standard for the Aviation Routine Weather Report/Aviation Selected Special Weather Report (METAR/SPECI) code formats.
- NWS ASOS News and Resources
The NWS ASOS home page.
- National Data Buoy Center
The home page of the NWS center responsible for data buoys and C-MAN stations.
- CRN information.
Last updated 25 July 2018
