Historical Observations Data Platform

A cloud-based, historical weather observations data platform focusing on near-real time to enable California’s energy sector access to high-quality, open climate and weather data. The historical observations data platform responds to stakeholder needs in understanding weather and climate information including the severity, duration, frequency, and rate of change over time of extreme weather events, as well as supporting downscaling projections. This historical data platform will seamlessly integrate with the Cal-Adapt: Analytics Engine platform and narrow applications of relevance on the Cal-Adapt: Data Explorer. This novel set of data will support current efforts in electricity demand planning, asset placement, resiliency, and estimating renewable energy generation capacity needs, and serve as a critical localized dataset for future downscaling efforts of global climate models in the variables and resolution (hourly, sub 3km) needed in energy sector applications. We implemented stringent, customized Quality Assurance/Quality Control (QA/QC) procedures to ensure both climatological mean and extreme event conditions relevant to the energy sector are accurately captured (such as temperature, precipitation, winds, and solar radiation). 

The historical observations data platform is supported by California Energy Commission grant PIR-19-006.

Map of Western United States with dots of various colors depicting weather station locations from 27 different source networks
Spatial coverage of 15,933 stations sourced from 27 publicly available weather observation networks within the Historical Data Platform.
Number of cleaned stations in the Historical Data Platform, spanning the 1980-2022 period. Stations are sourced from 27 publicly available historical data observation networks across the Western Electricity Coordinating Council (WECC) domain. Note: NDBC moored buoys and C-MAN stations are not included in this figure, but are a part of the Platform.
Timeseries of surface wind speed observations at a weather station in San Diego, CA during the February 16-19, 1988 Santa Ana wind event (noted by the red shaded bar). Santa Ana wind events are of high relevance to the energy sector given their impact to the electricity grid and connection to wildfires. This station successfully passed QA/QC and did not flag any wind speed observations as extreme outliers, which is the specific focus of the Historical Data Platform’s focus on tailored QA/QC for energy industry relevant extreme weather events.