History That Never Was

Adam Peterson (https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:United_States_K%C3%B6ppen.png) CC-by-sa-4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/)

One of my co-workers sent me a link the other day to the Western Regional Climate Center’s climate data summaries for the western United States. This is a great research tool if you’re writing fiction set in the western United States from the 1960s to the present day and need information on weather for your story. With this tool, you can find a particularly hot, dry summer, or a particularly cold, wet winter. Or vice versa!

The data is collected from a huge number of data stations, so you can pinpoint the location that you’re talking about with a great degree of accuracy, and thus lend some verisimilitude to your writing!

Or, if you just want to poke around a bit, you might find a story idea lurking somewhere in all of this data! Maybe you can find the hottest Fourth of July in the past fifty years in Montana, or the coldest Fourth of July in the past fifty years in southern California! There’s plenty to be found in this data!

Tags: climate data, research tool, story ideas

This entry was posted by dawn.vogel on Wednesday, July 4th, 2018 at 6:00 am and is filed under Inspiration. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.