My CEO messaged the team from Los Gatos last night and asked, “Anyone ever seen rain as heavy as that in California before. Whoa.” That got me thinking. Even though I was a toddler, I can remember 1968 at my parents’ house in Los Gatos. The ground was so saturated with water our backyard fence pulled out from its posts in a relatively light wind. That January, rainfalls were 150 percent of typical rainfall.

So, I quickly pulled some historical data on rainfall in San Jose using Import.io and Weather Warehouse data. The results were interesting.

Here are the two graphs I created using this data:

Total rainfall for 1968 doesn’t stick out, but the maximum 24-hour precipitation stands out for January 1968 of nearly 3 and half inches in 24 hours. More than some of the years’ totals. The only year that beat 1968 was 1911 with closer to 4 inches in one 24-hour period.

I love this data stuff, so if you do to, here’s how I did it. I found this URL for total January rainfall in San Jose, CA going back to 1900.

I plugged it into Import.io and voilà, I got a CSV file. Then, I could share it with different applications through Import.io API integrations such as Google Sheets. I could also easily compare it to other months by entering multiple URLs into the Import.io data extractor and creating graphs for those comparisons.

It’s easy to get web data to usable data with Import.io.