U.S. Weather Mapping
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The U.S. has thousands of official weather stations and numerous volunteer observers who register weather data each day. At many weather stations, observers have accumulated continuous data spanning many decades. Some other weather stations just worked for several years before closing. Such stations that collected data for some period are:
- 11,700 Cooperative Observer weather stations
- 122 National Weather Service Forecast Offices
- 840 automated stations at airports
- 910 Automated Surface Observing System
- 1,100 additional Automated Weather Observing Stations
122 weather service forecast offices are administered by The National Weather Service. Every weather service forecast office has a geographic territory of responsibility for providing local public, marine, hydrology, aviation, and fire forecasts. Below is the map of regions covered by the Weather Forecast Offices.
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How predictable is U.S. weather?
Almost every U.S. citizen has some reason to complain about unpredictable weather. The FiveThirtyEight team tried to find cites with the most unpredictable weather by comparing daily weather patterns against long-term averages.
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They found that Rapid City in South Dakota has one of the most unpredictable weather in the United States.
Unpredictable weather has other landlocked cities of Great Plains and Upper Midwest: Great Falls (Montana), Houghton (Michigan), Sioux Falls (South Dakota), Fargo (North Dakota), Duluth (Minnesota), Bismarck (North Dakota), Aberdeen (South Dakota), Grand Island (Nebraska) and Glasgow (Montana).
But these settlements have small populations. If we take only large cities within the 50 most populous metro areas, the most unstable climate has Kansas City (Missouri), Oklahoma City (Oklahoma), Minneapolis (Minnesota), Cincinnati (Ohio), Indianapolis (Indiana), St. Louis (Missouri), Birmingham (Alabama), Boston (Massachusetts), Milwaukee (Wisconsin), Dallas (Texas).