ThreadEx is a project designed to address the fragmentation of station information over time due to station relocations for the express purpose of calculating daily extremes of temperature and precipitation. There are often changes in the siting of instrumentation for any given National Weather Service/Weather Bureau location over the observational history in a given city/region. As a result, obtaining a long time series (i.e., one hundred years or more) for computation of extremes is difficult, unless records from the various locations are "threaded" or put together. This has been done, but different approaches and combinations of stations have resulted in confusion among data users and the general public about what constitutes an official daily extreme record.
In consultation with NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) and the National Weather Service (NWS), the Northeast Regional Climate Center (NRCC) has evaluated station relocations and built "threads" for 270 locations that are published in NCEI's Local Climatological Data using NOAA daily data sets. The data sets used for this project include NCEI GHCN-Daily, NCEI DSI3210, DSI3200, DSI3206 and DSI3205. In addition, NRCC has been able to extend over sixty station threads back further in time using daily data contributed by local NWS offices, state climate offices and regional climate centers. An ongoing process of adding daily data from the old NWS Climate Record Books continues. These data have been digitized, passed through quality control and used to extend threads back even further in time for over fifty stations to date (see Revision History for details).
In March 2017, fifty-one new sites were added as an expansion to the original ThreadEx network. These new sites first appeared in ThreadEx Version 12.0.
In April 2018, forty-nine new sites were added in a second network expansion. These new sites first appeared in ThreadEx Version 13.1.
In March 2019, thirty-two new sites were added in a third network expansion. These new sites first appeared in ThreadEx Version 14.0.
In March 2020, twenty-four new sites were added in a fourth network expansion. These new sites first appeared in ThreadEx Version 15.0.
In March 2021, two new sites were added in a fifth network expansion. These new sites first appeared in ThreadEx Version 16.0.
Methodology for Developing Threads
The record of a currently active station was used as the starting point for a station thread. This station's current record was used as far back in time as possible, taking precedence over a closed station's record during any periods of overlap. A search was conducted to identify other weather stations in the area that could be used to extend the thread further back in time. In this process, preference was given to Weather Service/Bureau stations (that were not themselves LCD stations). The thread was extended back in time as far as possible using NOAA daily data available in digital form. Partner input was solicited and this local expertise was used to fine-tune the station threads.
Contacts
If you have any questions, contact Keith Eggleston at NRCC (KLE1@cornell.edu) or Heather Vance and Bryant Korzeniewski at NCEI (Heather.Vance@noaa.gov and Bryant.Korzeniewski@noaa.gov).
Version 19.0 - released 12-April-2024.
Revision History.
Links.