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ISLSCP Initiative II Home General Data Overview Near-Surface Met Data Overview |
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ISLSCP Initiative II |
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Near-Surface Meteorology Data
This data set is a sub-sample of the a 0.5° latitude/longitude gridded dataset of monthly terrestrial surface climate over for the period 1901-1996. The dataset comprises a suite of seven climate elements: precipitation, mean temperature, diurnal temperature range, wet-day frequency, vapour pressure, cloud cover and ground-frost frequency. The spatial coverage extends over all land areas, including oceanic islands, but excluding Antarctica. Fields of monthly climate anomalies, relative to the 1961-1990 mean, were interpolated from surface climate observations using an inverse-distance weighting algorithm. The anomaly grids were then combined with a 1961-1990 mean monthly climatology to arrive at grids of monthly climate over the 96-year period.
The primary variables, precipitation, mean temperature and diurnal temperature range, were interpolated directly from station observations. The resulting time-series were compared with other, coarser resolution, datasets of similar temporal extent. The remaining climatic elements, termed secondary variables, were interpolated from merged datasets, comprising station observations and, in regions where there were no station data, synthetic data estimated using predictive relationships with the primary variables.
This data set is related to the CRU Monthly Mean data.
Data Provider: Mark New, Phil Jones, Mike Hulme
 Data Files (ISLSCP II Disc #1) |
 Data Set Documentation |
 Image Viewing Tutorial |
The files have been compressed using the PKZip program. Each uncompressed file contains space-delimited ASCII text with 720 values per line and 360 lines of data (0.5 degree resolution). 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. Each pixel represents a 0.5 by 0.5 degree area. These files are labeled with "_hd_".
There are also ASCII map files at 1x1 degre resolution, with 360 values per line and 180 lines of data per file. These files are labeled with "_1d_".
| Abbrev. | Variable | Units |
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| cloud_cover | Cloud cover | oktas |
| diurnal_tmp | Diurnal temperature range | degrees C |
| precip | Precipitation | mm |
| temp_mean | Mean temperature | degrees C |
| vapor_pres | Vapour pressure | hPa |
| wetday_frq | Wet day frequency | days |
Related Pages:
ISLSCP Initiative II Home
General Data Overview
Near-Surface Met Data Overview
CRU Monthly Climate Data
Revision Date: January 29, 2004