BRIDGING THE CLIMATE DATA GAP: A COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF HISTORICAL RECORDS AND NOAA'S DATABASE IN RURAL TENNESSEE

As climate change continues to get progressively worse, rural communities will be impacted by these changes and have unique issues that make them vulnerable. In 2014 the National Climate Assessment highlighted the issues faced by rural communities, but understanding how climate change will affect any rural region is dependent on having accurate long-term weather data. One source of long-term meteorological and storm data comes from The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) who monitors and records weather events. They have a number of data repositories that both researchers and the general public use for archiving storm events, including NOAA’s storm database. This database covers storms by county, usually starting in the 1950’s. However, there is a question of the completeness of the NOAA records such as the storm database. To understand the breadth of this gap in data we analyzed microfilm of newspapers from White County in rural Tennessee, and we compared the events recorded in the newspapers to those in NOAA’s database. Between the years 1958 and 1984, NOAA’s database only listed 15 weather events, but the newspapers reported 137 weather events over the same time frame. This study allows us to build a much more robust understanding of the climate for White County and better assess what sort of weather events have historically occurred in the region, which then allows for a better understanding of the future impact of climate change in this rural region.