Climate & Weather Resources

Climate and weather are fundamental parts of understanding any environment or ecosystem. They dictate what types of biomes can be where based on annual temperatures and precipitation. With this in mind, when studying an area such as Saunders Woods Preserve, it is important to establish a few different information sources on what the climate and weather patterns of this area are in order to obtain a more complete understanding of the area and how it may have changed or will change over time. An important differentiation to keep in mind is that climate means the overall temperature and precipitation patterns over many years, while weather relates to the day to day patterns. These terms also include factors such as wind, cloud cover, atmospheric pressures, and air quality. Being that Saunders is a relatively small size for a nature preserve at 25 acres of land, researching the climate of the greater surrounding area such as the nearest towns of Gladwyne (1 mile away), Bryn Mawr (2 miles away), or even Philadelphia (~10 miles away) will be sufficient ways to learn about its climate.

As my professor, Dr. Jim Egenrieder, has suggested, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association’s (NOAA) website for climate resources has proved to be a good starting point. It lists a wide range of topics including forecast tools, severe weather, historic and certified weather, winter weather, and much more, with each of the those links taking the viewer to 2-6 resources for obtaining that information and/or data. 

Since in this instance I am looking for climate data for the area surrounding Saunders, from the resources page I clicked on “Weather forecast tools” which directed me to perhaps the most useful resource that I have found in this exercise, NOAA’s National Weather Service website (https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=phi). I found this site to be straight forward to use and at no deficit to the amount of data and information. Particularly useful is the NOWData search tool that has provided me with relevant data such as temperature and precipitation graphs and tables for Conshohocken and Philadelphia with the option to view current as well as historical climate data. I have included a screen shot to display the many options for searching data with this tool, as well as two of the graphs I yielded. Note that while I created these graphs on the current year of 2022, the temperature overlays the data on historical data to give an outlook for the rest of the year. Furthermore, I could have made the date span any amount of time to obtain a much longer or older set of data in a single graph.

Alternatively, another resource that I check daily for the weather forecast, that with some further inspection has also shown to have very good records of historical weather, is Weather Underground (https://www.wunderground.com). This website is generally used more for the average joe who wants to see what the day’s forecast holds where they are located, but also has historical data for temperature, precipitation, wind, dew point, and pressure for every hour since 1945. The combination of ease of use, current weather forecasts, and solid historical data makes this website an easy recommendation from me. The downsides are that it may not have the level of detail in some aspects that the NOAA resources do, and the data can only be viewed by day, week or month, with no option for viewing by year or over a set period of time like the NOAA resource does. Depending what data and how in depth one is looking to go, this website may be sufficient for answering various queries. Here is a screenshot of the weather in the area surrounding Saunders from 77 years ago.