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Description

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Description - Introduction

Photo courtesy Grant Goodge/NCDC

GHCN (Global Historical Climatology Network)-Daily is a database that addresses the critical need for historical daily temperature, precipitation, and snow records over global land areas. Like its monthly counterpart, GHCN-Daily is a composite of climate records from numerous sources that were merged and then subjected to a suite of quality assurance reviews. In the archive includes the following meteorological elements:

• Daily maximum temperature
• Daily minimum temperature
• Precipitation (i.e., rainfall and snow water equivalent)
• Snowfall
• Snow depth

GHCN-Daily serves as the official archive for daily data from the global climate observing system (GCOS) Surface Network (GSN) and is particularly well suited for monitoring and assessment activities related to the frequency and magnitude of extremes. Containing observations of one or more of the above elements at more than 40,000 stations that are distributed across all continents, the dataset is the world's largest collection of daily climatological data. The total of 1.4 billion data values includes 250 million values in each for maximum and minimum temperatures, 500 million precipitation totals, and 200 million observations each for snowfall and snow depth. Station records, some of which extend back to the 19th century, are updated daily and are usually available from this page one to two days after the date and time of the observation.