ISLSCP Initiative II

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Hydrology, Soils, & Topography Data

GTS Gauge-Based Analyses of Daily Precipitation over Global Land Areas

The GTS gauge-based analyses of daily precipitation are defined by interpolating gauge observations using the algorithm of Shepard (1968). The gauge observations used here are those available from the Global Telecommunications System (GTS). The algorithm of Shepard (1968) has been widely used to interpolate gauge observations of monthly, pentad, and daily precipitation (Rudolf 1993, Xie et al. 1996). This algorithm is used to interpolate the irregularly distributed station observations onto grid points. The weighting coefficients are inversely proportional to the gauge-grid point distance and are adjusted by a cosine function taking into account the directional isolation of each gauge relative to all other nearby gauges.

Data Provider: Pingping Xie, John E. Janowiak

Data Files (ISLSCP II Disc #1)

Data Set Documentation

Image Viewing Tutorial

File Information

The files have been compressed using the PKZip program. The uncompressed files contain space-delimited ASCII text on a half-degree grid (720 values per line and 360 lines), or ASCII text on a 1-degree grid (360 values per line and 180 lines). Each line is terminated by a newline character. The data are structured so that the upperleft corner of the first pixel is located at 90 North latitude and 180 West longitude.

• gts_precip_xx_YYYYMMDD.asc: gridded daily precipitation rates, in mm/month, where xx can be either hd or 1d for spatial resolutions of 1/2 and 1 degree, respectively. YYYY is the year from 1986 to 1995, MM is the month from 01 to 12, and the DD is the day-of-month number from 01 to 31.

• gts_numgauges_xx_YYYYMM00.asc: gridded number of rain gauges used in the production of the gridded daily precipitation rate data set above.

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                GTS Daily Gauge Precipitation

Revision Date: October 21, 2004