ISH / ISD surface station inventory

Sources & data notes

Source: NOAA NCEI Integrated Surface Database (ISD, historically ISH) station history, https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/pub/data/noaa/isd-history.csv (copy supplied to the build, not downloaded by this script), retrieved 14 September 2026. Basemap tiles are fetched live from OpenStreetMap and Esri; choose No basemap if you are offline. ISD is superseded. NCEI announced that it would not be updated beyond 2025-08-24 and that direct NCEI-hosted download would be retired on 2026-07-31, with NOAA Open Data Dissemination (NODD) as the continuing access path. The file used for this build does not match the announced date exactly: 8,985 records end on 2025-08-24, but 2,194 more run past it, to a maximum of 2025-08-28. Treat 2025-08-24 as the freeze and the few days beyond it as residual. Either way, a record ending at the freeze was active then, not necessarily active today. The colour coding is a derived classification by which identifiers a record carries (USAF, WBAN, both, neither); ISD publishes no network code. Records excluded for carrying no usable coordinate: 1,187 with a blank or unreadable latitude or longitude, and 379 more at exactly 0.000, 0.000, which is an ISD placeholder rather than a position in the Gulf of Guinea. Records reporting an elevation above 6,000 m: 4. These are plotted as published; several are the station number written into the elevation field and should not be trusted. BEGIN and END bracket the period of record and say nothing about gaps inside it: use isd-inventory.csv for station-year-month completeness before committing to a station for AERMET. Non-U.S. ISD data are subject to WMO Resolution 40 redistribution restrictions.