The Global Historical Climatology Network: Long-term monthly temperature, precipitation, sea level pressure, and station pressure data

Abstract

Interest in global climate change has risen dramatically during the last several years. In a similar fashion, the number of data sets available to study global change has also increased. Unfortunately, these data sets have been compiled by many different organizations/researchers, making it confusing and time consuming for individual researchers to acquire the best'' data. In response to this rapid growth in the number of global data sets, the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) and the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) commenced the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) project. The purpose of this project is to compile an improved global base-line data set of long-term monthly mean temperature, precipitation, sea level pressure, and station pressure for a dense network. of worldwide meteorological stations. Specifically, the GHCN project seeks to consolidate the numerous preexisting national-, regional-, and global-scale data sets into a single global climate data base that can be updated, enhanced, and distributed at regular intervals. The first version of the GHCN data base was completed during the summer of 1992. It contains 6039 temperature, 7533 precipitation, 1883 sea level pressure, and 1873 station pressure stations. All stations have at least 10 years of data, 40% have more than 50 years of data, and 10% have more than 100 years of data. Spatial coverage is good over most of the globe, particularly for the United States and central Europe. In comparison to other major global data sets, dramatic improvements are evident over South America, Africa, and Asia. The GHCN data base is available as a Numeric Data Package (NDP) from CDIAC. The NDP consists of this document and two magnetic tapes that contain machine-readable data files and accompanying retrieval codes. This document describes, in detail, both the GHCN data base and the contents of the magnetic tap