Where to get historical weather data for any location

Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) and ECMWF · Data portal and API · Free (CC BY 4.0; account required)

ERA5 at the source, regridded to 0.25° for the whole period from 1940, for anyone comfortable with gridded data or Python.

• ERA5 hourly data from 1940 to about five days ago on a 0.25° grid; ERA5-Land from 1950 at higher resolution for land variables.
• Updated daily; the early release (ERA5T) can be revised two to three months later, and users are notified if it is.
• Grids as GRIB or NetCDF; a separate ERA5 time-series dataset returns the nearest grid point as CSV or NetCDF.
• Scripted downloads through the cdsapi Python package with a personal access token.

Good to know

• You need an account and must accept each dataset's licence before downloading.
• Gridded files need processing before they can be used in design tools.

Visit ERA5 on the Copernicus Climate Data Store

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) · Station data archive and search tools · Free

Measured records from real weather stations, including very long daily series.

• GHCNh, NOAA's next-generation hourly and synoptic station dataset, replaces the Integrated Surface Database (ISD).
• GHCNd holds daily records from more than 100,000 stations in 180 countries and territories, some covering more than 175 years.
• Climate Data Online offers free access, with search by station, ZIP code, city, county, state or country.

Good to know

• About half of GHCNd stations report only precipitation, and record lengths vary widely between stations.
• NCEI's site notes that a cloud migration may cause temporary data access delays.

Visit NOAA NCEI station data (GHCNh, GHCNd and Climate Data Online)

Open-Meteo · Web API, with CSV and XLSX downloads · Free for non-commercial use; paid API plans for commercial use

Fast hourly reanalysis series for any coordinates without handling ERA5 files yourself.

• ERA5 (0.25°, from 1940), ERA5-Land (0.1°, from 1950), CERRA for Europe (5 km, 1985 to June 2021 in Open-Meteo's archive) and ECMWF IFS (9 km, from 2017).
• Returns JSON through the API; the documentation page also downloads CSV or XLSX.
• Data licensed under CC BY 4.0, with attribution required.

Good to know

• The free API is limited to 10,000 calls a day (and 5,000 an hour and 300,000 a month) and allows no commercial use.
• Open-Meteo advises using only ERA5 or ERA5-Land for multi-decade climate analysis, to avoid inconsistencies from weather model upgrades.

Visit Open-Meteo Historical Weather API

NASA Langley Research Center · Data access viewer and API · Free

Free global hourly and daily series, including EPW files, from NASA satellite and reanalysis data.

• Meteorology from MERRA-2 on a 0.5° × 0.625° grid (daily from 1981) and solar data from NASA's SRB archive and CERES on a 1° grid.
• Hourly data from 2001 as CSV, JSON, NetCDF or ASCII.
• EPW files from 2001 onwards for its Sustainable Infrastructure (formerly Sustainable Buildings) community.

Good to know

• Coarse grids, better suited to regional conditions than to a specific site.

Visit NASA POWER

Meteostat · Website, Python library, CSV datasets and JSON API · Free (CC BY 4.0)

Free weather station observations in a developer-friendly form, especially from Python.

• Long-term time series from thousands of weather stations, with data from NOAA, Deutscher Wetterdienst and Environment Canada.
• An open-source Python library, bulk CSV datasets and a JSON API.
• Redistributed data under CC BY 4.0, with attribution to Meteostat and the original providers.

Good to know

• Station data keep their gaps and their distance from your site, and Meteostat states it cannot guarantee accuracy or completeness.

Visit Meteostat

Oikolab · Weather data API and web downloader · Pay as you go at $0.01 per data unit, with 1,500 free units a month; Business plan $150/month

Building simulation users who want ERA5-based time series or typical and actual-year EPW files for any location.

• Historical data from 1940 with global coverage, from datasets such as ERA5.
• JSON, CSV and NetCDF output, and a Weather Data Downloader that exports CSV without code.
• TMY or actual-year (AMY) EPW files for any location from 1940 to the present.
• Climate.OneBuilding.Org credits Oikolab's solar radiation data in revising its TMYx files.

Good to know

• ERA5-Land and gridded NetCDF data are Enterprise-plan features.

Visit Oikolab

Visual Crossing Corporation · Weather API and data download tool · Free plan (1,000 records a day); paid plans

Business users who want historical weather and forecasts through one API or a spreadsheet-friendly download.

• More than 50 years of history and a 15-day forecast through the Weather API or a query builder; sub-hourly history on every plan except Professional.
• Blends station observations, including NOAA's GHCN datasets, with ERA5 and MERRA-2 reanalysis.

Good to know

• On the free plan each history record returned counts towards the daily limit.

Visit Visual Crossing

meteoblue AG · Web app with CSV download · €100 per location for one year of access, plus VAT (€121 with Spanish VAT); discounts for more locations; free evaluation for Basel

Gap-free hourly history for a few specific places, downloaded as CSV without code.

• Hourly data since 1940 for any place, from ERA5T (recommended for history), meteoblue's NEMS models and local high-resolution models.
• Simulation data at 4 to 30 km: 30 km from 1940 and higher resolution since 2008.
• Unlimited downloads for the purchased locations for a year, plus online year comparisons, wind roses and risk tools.

Good to know

• meteoblue notes that data from 1940 to 1980 are less accurate than later data, because satellite observations were not yet available.
• Model simulation data, not measurements.

Visit meteoblue history+

Cedar Lake Ventures, Inc. · Consumer climate website · Free to browse; Data Download plan €89.99/month

A quick, readable picture of typical weather through the year for a named place.

• Temperatures reconstructed from nearby weather stations; cloud, precipitation, wind and solar data from NASA's MERRA-2 reanalysis.
• The paid Data Download plan (1,000 credits a month) sells history and averages data per location.

Good to know

• Its reports use data from 1980 to 2016 on a 50 km MERRA-2 grid, and Weather Spark notes that model reconstructions cannot capture many local microclimates.

Visit Weather Spark

Embrace Ideas · Web app, in the browser · Free plan; paid plans from €59/month (cancellation takes effect after 12 billing cycles) or €599/year, with a 7-day free trial

Seeing a site's typical year, recent climate trend and long rainfall record at any address, without downloading or processing data.

• Every search uses the nearest OneBuilding.org weather file (usually TMYx); paid projects add a typical year compiled from Open-Meteo's ERA5-Land, ERA5 and ECMWF IFS blend, CERRA or NORA3 at the site's coordinates, corrected to the site's elevation.
• Site data months are selected with the ISO 15927-4 method from the latest 15 complete years in the dataset (2006 to 2020 where CERRA is used), and projects with site-specific data show a temperature trend back to 1941, projected to 2030, 2050, 2070 and 2090.
• Precipitation from NOAA GHCN stations for the latest 30 years; projects add a rainfall record back to 1941, built from CHELSA V2.1 daily data at about 1 km and shown as monthly and yearly totals.

Good to know

• Not a data download service: there is no CSV or JSON export and no API.
• EPW files, including a custom EPW builder from ERA5-Land or CERRA, are downloadable only on the Technical and Enterprise plans.