Important: The Climate Analysis Branch (PSD1) web site will be down in anticipiation of our major web restructuring starting Tuesday Jan 20th at 1pm MST.
You can find more info about the upcoming URL changes here.

University of Delaware Air Temperature & Precipitation

One-Line Description:

University of Delaware Global Air Temperature and Precipitation: monthly & climatologies.

Temporal Coverage:

Monthly values for 1950/01 - 1999/12.
Long term monthly means, derived from data for years 1950 - 1999.

Spatial Coverage:

0.5 degree latitude x 0.5 degree longitude global grid (720x360).
89.75N - 89.75S, 0.25E - 359.75E.

Levels:

Update Schedule:

Static

Download/Plot Data:

Variable	Statistic	Level	Download File
Air Temperature	Monthly Long Term Mean	Surface	air.mon.ltm.nc
' '	Monthly Mean	Surface	air.mon.mean.nc
Precipitation	Monthly Long Term Mean	Surface	precip.mon.ltm.nc
' '	Monthly Mean	Surface	precip.mon.total.nc

Usage Restrictions:

None

Detailed Description:

Cort Willmott & Kenji Matsuura of the University of Delaware have put data together from a large number of stations, both from the GHCN (Global Historical Climate Network) and, more extensively, from the archive of Legates & Willmott. The result is a monthly climatology of precipitation and air temperature, both at the surface, and a time series, spanning 1950 to 1999, of monthly mean surface air temperatures, and monthly total precipitation. It is land-only in coverage, and complements the ICOADS (International Comprehensive Ocean-Atmosphere Data Set) data set well. The version we have stored online is 1.02 and some values will have changed from our 1950-1996 files. For a complete description of the data as given by the providers and references to relevant papers please see their web pages at the University of Delaware.

Caveats:

None

Related File Naming & Structure Information:

File Names:

var.time.stat.nc (In directory: /Datasets/udel.airt.precip/)

OpenDap File Names:

http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/opendap/nph-nc/Datasets/udel.airt.precip/var.time.stat.nc

Dataset Format and Size:

PSD standard NetCDF 311 Mbyte file for each monthly file (packed).
PSD standard NetCDF 30 Mbyte file for each long term mean file (packed).

Missing Data:

Missing data is flagged with a value of 32767s.

Citation:

Please note: If you acquire UDel_AirT_Precip data products from PSD, we ask that you acknowledge us in your use of the data. This may be done by including text such as UDel_AirT_Precip data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSD, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/ in any documents or publications using these data. We would also appreciate receiving a copy of the relevant publications. This will help PSD to justify keeping the UDel_AirT_Precip data set freely available online in the future. Thank you!

References:

Legates, D. R. and C. J. Willmott (1990a) Mean Seasonal and Spatial Variability Global Surface Air Temperature. Theoretical and Applied Climatology , 41, 11-21.
Shepard, D. (1968) A two-dimensional Interpolation function for irregularly-spaced Data. Proceedings, 1968 ACM National Conference, 517-523.
Willmott, C. J., C. M. Rowe and W. D. Philpot (1985) Small-Scale Climate Maps: A Sensitivity Analysis of Some Common Assumptions Associated with Grid-point Interpolation and Contouring. American Cartographer, 12, 5-16.
Willmott, C. J. and K. Matsuura (1995) Smart Interpolation of Annually Averaged Air Temperature in the United States. Journal of Applied Meteorology, 34, 2577-2586.

Original Source:

Center for Climatic Research Department of Geography University of Delaware Newark, DE 19716 The University of Delaware Web site offers extensive documentation of this data set. Please address questions on the analysis method to Kenji Matsuura (kenjisan@udel.edu) University of Delaware.

Contact:

Physical Sciences Division: Data Management
NOAA/ESRL/PSD
325 Broadway
Boulder, CO 80305-3328
esrl.psd.data@noaa.gov