• Legacy LCD supplements missing LCDv2 years for Austin (2016–2017) and Oklahoma City (2000–2017 and 2019–2022), with metric units and the actual source URL retained.
• Rainfall window: January 1, 2000 through the latest available NOAA observations at the snapshot cutoff.
• Location and equipment histories are matched to the local date of each hourly observation, using NOAA effective periods.
• Main outputs: one joined station-hour table per city. Earlier reference tables are retired.
• Chicago uses Midway (KMDW). Houston includes Hobby and Bush Intercontinental. New York uses Central Park (KNYC).
• Coverage includes 27 cities. Eight additional catalog cities remain outside the confirmed station scope.
• is_latest identifies the newest available report for each station. The verified LCDv2 reports currently end September 5, 2026 at 11:00 UTC for most stations; West Palm Beach ends September 1, 2026 at 04:00 UTC; the snapshot was requested on September 14, 2026. This is a delayed archive snapshot, not a real-time feed.

• station_id, city, state: station and location identifiers shared across tables.
• observed_at, hour_utc: original report time converted to UTC and its hour bucket.
• precipitation_mm, precipitation_raw, is_trace: hourly liquid-equivalent precipitation, original value, and trace indicator.
• report_type, quality_status: observation method and retained value status.
• latitude, longitude, coordinate_precision, coordinate_datum: published station coordinates and precision metadata.
• equipment_types, equipment_record_count: distinct equipment codes and the number of active NOAA precipitation-program records.
• location_valid_from, location_valid_to: effective dates of the location joined to each hourly report.
• source_url, snapshot_date: source provenance and retrieval snapshot date.

Missing precipitation remains null, distinct from zero and trace. Hours without a qualifying source report are absent rather than filled with zero. One report is selected per hour: NOAA hourly summaries take priority, with routine METAR rolling-hour reports as fallback; overlapping reports are never summed. Unverified gauge coordinates remain unavailable. Station coordinates are approximate gauge locations, not surveyed gauge positions. A metadata coordinate update does not necessarily mean equipment moved. Equipment history covers 26 stations; Midway and St. Petersburg have no precipitation-equipment history in HOMR. Overlapping program records are retained as distinct equipment codes without multiplying hourly rows. Historical periods may describe predecessor sites and do not establish when a metadata change first became publicly known.

• Comparing hourly precipitation across stations
• Investigating station and instrument changes
• Preparing city-level machine-learning inputs with historically applicable station metadata

NOAA National Centers for Environmental Information supplies Local Climatological Data (LCDv2 and legacy LCD) and the Historical Observing Metadata Repository. License: CC0-1.0, matching NOAA’s LCDv2 catalog record. NOAA station metadata is public-domain federal information. Source links and quality limitations remain attached to records.