After launching the Go to the interactive map of climate stations you can search for a location. In the following example we are searching for "Big Timber, Montana".

If the search is successful the map will zoom to the location requested.

Red station icons indicate stations that participate in the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) and tend to have higher quality data and a longer history.  All other stations have gold icons.

Clicking on a station will launch a popup with basic information. Clicking on the "More info" link will launch a web page with additional detail about the station.

The Montana Climate Office provides two ways to access station data:

• The preferred method is to use the Online map with links to download files and additional information.
• Through our Montana Climate Office file transfer (FTP) site

With the online map, it is best to first review the summary information on the web page that describes the variables measured, the length and period of measurement, the number of observations and the completeness.  Pay particular attention to the NOAA standard units for each variable.  For example, tempertaure is recorded as tenths of degrees Centigrade, so a value in the table of -102 is -10.2C.

After detrimining that this is station data of interest you can download the data via the link at the top of the page.  Data is distributed in comma-delimited-value (CSV) text format that will open in a spreadsheet program like Excel.  Filtering and sort will help you work with the dataset.

A link to additional resources is available at the bottom of the page.  This link will take you to a site maintained by NOAA that allows for quick summaries of station data.