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NOAA's National Climatic Data Center released a 3-disk CD-ROM describing the snow climatology of the United States. Snowfall and snow depth data through 1996 were analyzed for 5525 stations in the contiguous U.S. and Alaska. Climatic variables include daily, monthly, and seasonal snowfall and snow depth (snow cover). Computed statistics include mean, median, quartiles, extremes, frequencies, and the number of years with non-missing data. Several indicators were computed, based on the data and metadata, to enable the user to assess the quality of the stations. These include frequencies of station moves and observation time changes, number of missing values and breaks in the record, number of values failing the QC checks, and percentages indicating how complete the data record is. The snow climatology CD-ROM also includes files from two other NCDC projects: return period statistics of seasonal (August-July) 1-day, 2-day, and 3-day extreme snowfall, and total seasonal snowfall amount, for 10-year, 25-year, 50-year, and 100-year return periods; 1961-1990 snowfall and snow depth normals. The CD-ROM set is a collection of DOS ASCII files; the CD contains no software or extraction routines that allow the user to import data directly into spreadsheets or other applications. However, a file may be easily copied from the CD-ROM onto a hard drive or other device with the DOS copy command for manipulation. The text files are easily read by a word processor or text file editor.
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