About the site
County-level climate data, written in plain language.
WeatherByCounty is independently published data journalism. We present the climate statistics that the federal government already collects — 30-year temperature averages, precipitation, snowfall, extreme-heat days, and growing-season length — for every one of America's 3,100+ counties.
What WeatherByCounty Is
WeatherByCounty is a data-journalism site, not a meteorological forecast service. Our purpose is to take county-level climate statistics published by NOAA and present them in a form a regular person can actually compare and act on. If you are deciding where to move, evaluating seasonal patterns in a region you're considering, or just want to know how your county stacks up nationally, this site is built for you.
Every page on the site is built from primary-source datasets: the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) U.S. Climate Normals 1991-2020. Each statistic is attributed to its source, and the underlying methodology — including how we aggregate station-level data to county level — is published on the methodology page.
Who Runs WeatherByCounty
WeatherByCounty is published and edited by Evan Brooks, Data Editor of the ByCounty Network. The site uses automated pipelines to ingest public datasets from NOAA, the U.S. Census Bureau, EPA, and other federal agencies, then transforms them into plain-language reporting that anyone can use.
The data editor documents the methodology for composite scores and rankings across all 13 sites in the network, spot-checks AI-generated narratives for accuracy, and signs off on every published page. The data editor is the named editorial owner of this site: published statistics either match the source data or they are corrected.
The data editor is not a meteorologist, climatologist, or licensed weather professional, and WeatherByCounty does not present itself as a forecast or emergency-alert service. We do not issue severe-weather warnings, and we do not provide real-time forecasts. Our role is the data-editor role — verify the numbers, respect the underlying averaging periods, and decline to publish anything that strays beyond what the source data supports.
Long-form features and reported pieces, when published, carry a visible byline and — for topics that benefit from subject-matter expertise — a named reviewer credit at the top of the article.
Why I Built WeatherByCounty
I started WeatherByCounty after realizing how different severe weather patterns are from one county to the next, and how hard it was to find that data in one place. The NOAA publishes extraordinary climate normals through NCEI, but the data is buried in station-level files and academic reports. I wanted a site where a regular person could see, in 30 seconds, how their county compares on temperature, precipitation, snowfall, and extreme-heat days — with the sources right there on the page. No paywall, no gatekeeping, just public data presented honestly.
That same need shows up in every vertical we cover: property taxes, cost of living, crime, schools, environmental risk. The government already collects this data. Our job is to clean it, verify it, and make it comparable.
How We Decide What to Publish
Two documents govern this site's editorial decisions:
- Editorial Standards — our mission, source policy, AI-usage policy, corrections process, funding disclosure, and update cadence.
- Methodology — the exact data sources, aggregation method, limitations, and update cadence behind every page.
Both documents carry a "Last reviewed" date and are regenerated when our methodology changes.
Our Relationship to the Data
WeatherByCounty is independent. We are not affiliated with NOAA, the National Weather Service, or any government agency. We use NOAA's public datasets under the public-domain release that applies to federal works. Each county page credits the data source that drives it.
When we link out — for example, to the National Weather Service or to NOAA NCEI — we link to primary sources, not aggregators.
AI in Our Workflow
Per-county pages include a short narrative summary generated with the assistance of Claude (Anthropic) from the same statistics shown on the page. This is a tool for turning a row of numbers into a readable paragraph; it is not the source of any data on the site. The narrative prompt is constrained to forbid causation claims, weather predictions, and unsourced inference. The Data Editor reviews the prompt and spot-checks output before publication. When source data is refreshed, narratives are regenerated.
We disclose this clearly because honesty is the right policy — and because Google's policies treat undisclosed AI authorship as a separate problem from AI authorship itself. The fix for AI prose on an informational site is not to hide it; the fix is to pair it with a named human editor, a clear methodology, and source-grounded constraints. That is what we do.
Part of the ByCounty Network
WeatherByCounty is one site in the ByCounty Network — a family of independent data sites covering property taxes, cost of living, income, crime, schools, environmental risk, water quality, and more. Visit CountyScore.com for the network's flagship hub, which combines every vertical's data into a single composite county report.
Contact
For data corrections, source attributions, partnership questions, or press inquiries, write to editorial@weatherbycounty.com. See our editorial standards for the corrections process and timelines.
This page was last reviewed on by Evan Brooks, Data Editor.
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