The dataset we will use for examples in this chapter is from the United States National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). It is a subset of the U.S. 15 Minute Precipitation Data, which is available on the NOAA website (direct link: https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cdo-web/search?datasetid=PRECIP_15).

We are using the dataset from January 1, 2013 to January 1, 2014 for the U.S. state of Colorado. You can download it from NOAA or from the Packt website for this book. Make sure to check all the available fields when downloading the data from NOAA. Also download the documentation on the dataset, which has descriptions of the fields (https://www1.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/cdo/documentation/PRECIP_15_documentation.pdf).

For this exercise, you can save reading the documentation until the end of the chapter to see how it lines up with what we observe. For any other situation, you should scour the documentation first and take notes as if you are studying for a final exam in a class where you want the top grade.