Download the Data to a Spreadsheet

(Note: The directions provided here are for Microsoft Excel, but other spreadsheet programs should work similarly.) 

You will need to copy and paste the data from the Web browser to your spreadsheet. Highlight the data only (leaving out the text at the beginning of the page and the column headings). Including any text that is not part of the actual data will confuse the spreadsheet. Starting with the first year (1914 for San Diego) select and copy all the data down to the last data record. Do not include the Period of Record Statistics.

Paste this data into your spreadsheet, leaving a couple of empty rows at the top for column headers.

[Alternate Method: You may save the data in a text file, then import it to the spreadsheet. From the Web browser Select File, Save as to save the data as a text file. Open this text file and delete all extraneous text at the beginning, as well as all the Period of Record Statistics at the end. Close and save the text file. Open a new spreadsheet and open the saved text file. Excel will provide a Data Import Wizard enabling you to format the data in appropriate columnar form in a few easy steps.]

You may need to delete extraneous columns created in the process of pasting the text into the spreadsheet. Also, some of the data may have letter symbols associated with them, such as "68.55a" or "73.35z." These letters must be removed; otherwise, the spreadsheet does not recognize these as numbers. To remove them, use the Find/Replace option found under the Edit menu. Type in the extraneous letter in the find box and leave the replace box empty. Then click the Replace All button. Do the same for any other letters found in the data. You may need simply to retype the data in some of the cells. 

You will also need to delete the entire "Annual" column of data, which is located after the December column.

Remove years in which all the values are 0, because such rows usually represent years when data were not kept, and they can skew the results of your analysis.

Keep in mind that cleaning up the data sets in this way is a normal part of the process scientists have to go through before they can analyze large data sets.

Finally, add column headers, beginning with "Years" in the first column and the months January through December in the remaining columns.

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