So I was looking at the QCLCD hourly weather data from NOAA, and I noticed something weird about it. There's a column for hourly precipitation amount (HourlyPrecip
), and there's also a column for the current weather condition (WeatherType
). However, there appear to be many instances where the WeatherType
reflects rain whereas the HourlyPrecip
column does not show any rain.
Here's a sample of the data that shows the issue i'm talking about, for a particular station (NYC Central Park):
Date Time WeatherType DryBulbCelsius RelativeHumidity WindSpeed HourlyPrecip
20130801 951 -RA 22.8 71 0 T
20130801 1031 -RA BR 21.1 87 3
20130801 1047 -RA BR 21.0 81 5
20130801 1051 -RA BR 20.6 87 5 0.01
20130801 1120 +RA BR 20.0 90 0
20130801 1132 +RA BR 19.4 93 5
20130801 1144 -RA BR 19.4 93 0
20130801 1151 -RA BR 19.4 93 0 0.15
20130801 1159 -RA BR 20.0 93 6
20130801 1211 -RA BR 20.0 93 9
20130801 1219 -RA BR 20.0 90 6
20130801 1230 -RA BR 19.4 93 6
20130801 1251 RA BR 19.4 90 5 0.09
As you can see, these columns all indicate some degree of rain (RA) in the WeatherType
column, but many do not show hourly precipitation.
Does the WeatherType
reflect some sort of aggregated weather condition over a few hours, or is the data wrong (unlikely because this issue affects a large percentage of observations)?