Single points of weather data are often not very interesting. You can look at see what the high temperature was on a given day, but so what? Trends and streaks are much more interesting. How many consecutive days above 60°F has your city had in January? When’s the last snowfall greater than 2″?

If you’re looking to answer those kinds of questions, the NOAA Regional Climate Centers (RCCs) has a tool for you. xmACIS2, part of the Applied Climate Imitation System, provides a free web interface to get that data. xmACIS2 provides a variety of configurable queries to provide data in tabular or graphical form.

xmACIS2 interactive temperature graph for Lafayette, IN.

This is an interesting tool to explore, especially when you’re in the throes of exceptional weather.