Editorial Policy & Corrections
What PlainClimate publishes
PlainClimate presents the U.S. climate normals published by the NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) for the 1991–2020 period: 30-year average temperatures, precipitation, snowfall, frost dates, growing-season length, and heating/cooling degree days for 6,915 U.S. cities drawn from 15,492 weather stations. We do not generate weather forecasts and we do not produce original temperature measurements.
How the pages are built
Every figure on this site is compiled programmatically from NOAA's public-domain dataset by our ETL (extract-transform-load) pipeline, then rendered live from our database. We do not hand-key values, and — to be plain about it — a human editor does not individually review each of the thousands of city and state pages. What the editorial team does own is the methodology: which NOAA stations map to each city, how monthly normals roll up to annual figures, the comfort-score formula, the page templates, and this corrections process. When we describe data as "compiled by" the editorial team, that is what we mean — accountability for the method and framing, not a claim of manual line-by-line review.
The comfort score
The 1–100 comfort score is a PlainClimate composite — it is not a NOAA metric. It combines temperature moderation, low extreme-weather frequency, moderate precipitation, and (where hourly data exist) humidity into a single index. It reflects broad preference patterns and is intended for orientation, not as an authoritative livability ruling; individual tolerance for heat, cold, rain, and humidity varies widely. See the methodology for the full derivation.
Accuracy & corrections
Because the data flows from a single authoritative source through a documented pipeline, most errors would be systematic (a mapping or formula issue) rather than one-off typos. If you spot a value that looks wrong — an implausible temperature, a mis-attributed station, a broken total — please tell us via the contact page. We trace reported issues to the source data or pipeline, fix them there, and re-publish. Corrections to the methodology or formula are noted with the date they took effect.
Independence
PlainClimate is published by Kiznis Studio and is not affiliated with NOAA or any U.S. government agency. We display advertising (see our privacy policy), which never influences how the underlying public data is reported.
