Weather Bureau Meteorological Data

About the Collection

In 1870, Congress authorized the Army Signal Service Corps to create a river and stream gauge program as well as a weather observation and forecasting program. The Organic Act, passed in 1890, transferred all weather and related river services to the Department of Agriculture and created a civilian U.S. Weather Bureau, which would later become the National Weather Service.

The Oklahoma Agricultural Experiment Station was established in 1890, the same year as Oklahoma A&M College. A collection of weather data began in 1893 under the station’s first director, James C. Neal. Neal’s signature appears as the Cooperative Observer on the monthly reports until 1895 when he passed away. The station included various areas for experimentation including animal husbandry, orchards and vineyards, crop production, and horticulture, which was responsible for the meteorological record.

The Weather Bureau in the U.S. Department of Agriculture published the "Cooperative Observers’ Meteorological Records" at the StillwaterAgricultural Experiment Station. This collection is the digitazation of two handwritten volumes of weather data for Stillwater, Oklahoma, spanning the years 1893-1940. 

The daily record includes temperature, precipitation, wind direction/prevailing wind, state of the weather/character of day (clear, cloudy), and a monthly summary, also remarks or notes, such as February 16, 1928 – “Snow melted as fast as it fell,” or on March 11, 1939 – “Severe dust storm.” Each page in the volumes includes a month of data for a particular year.

Temperature and precipitation data has been recorded in other reports, notably the Weather Bureau’s Monthly Weather Review and Climatological Data volumes, but these hand-written pages include much more detailed information for Stillwater amd Payne County.

About the Digitization Process

These volumes were digitized by the OSU Library’s Digital Resources and Discovery Services department in 2021. A Zeutschel OS 12002 Advanced scanner digitized pages as bitonal .tiff images with a resolution of 600 pixels per inch. Metadata was generated via use copies derived from the originals in PDF format.

Library staff transcribed the data into Excel spreadsheets that mirror the structure of the forms and PDFs have been created for each of the pages. Students in the Department of Plant and Soil Sciences combined data from all of the spreadsheets into one comprehensive data table using R programming language. For copies of the monthly files in Excel, contact the OSU Library Government Documents Department at 405-744-6546.

Access the Physical Collection

Although part of the Government Documents collection, these volumes are held in the Archives due to the fragility of the paper. The physical copies are not available to the public.

View the Collection

Follow Us

Contact Us

Government Documents Department
204 Edmon Low Library
Oklahoma State University
Stillwater, OK 74078
Phone: 405-744-6546
suzanne.reinman@okstate.edu

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