Data Sources
One of the primary goals of GHCN-Monthly was to acquire additional data in order to enhance spatial and temporal coverage. There were three reasons for this goal: data for recent months allows one to assess current climatic conditions and place them in historical perspective, denser coverage facilitates the analysis of regional climate change, and certain areas (or certain times in certain areas) are under-sampled even from the perspective of a global analysis. Because numerous institutions operate weather stations and because no single repository archives all of the data for all stations, five acquisition strategies were employed to maximize the available pool of data: contacting data centers, exploiting personal contacts, tapping related projects, conducting literature searches, and distributing miscellaneous requests. As a result, GHCN-Monthly contains data from dozens of diverse sources. Table 1 lists the sources for temperature, and Table 2 lists the sources for precipitation.
