GHCN
Contents
GHCN¶
Overview¶
We have replicated the daily station precipitation data from the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN). GHCN-Daily is an integrated database of daily climate summaries from land surface stations across the globe. It is comprised of daily climate records from numerous sources that have been integrated and subjected to a common suite of quality assurance reviews and contains records from over 100,000 stations in 180 countries and territories. This is an extract of the dataset description from the GHCN website where you can find more information on this data. We replicated only the precipitation daily station data organised “by_year”. This is an alternate form of the GHCN Daily dataset. The period of record station files are parsed into yearly files that contain all available GHCN Daily station data for that year plus a time of observation field (where available). The original by_year files are updated daily to be in sync with updates to the GHCN Daily dataset, but we are updating them on a weekly basis.
More details on how the data is organised and its status are available from the documentation files stored with the data. For more information on methods and data quality assurance can be found here.
Data download¶
The data is downloaded from the NCDC NOAA ftp server:
ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/ghcn
The files are updated daily on the server. We update them once a week, the automated updates are managed via a GitHub Action.
The script uses wget, to run: ./ghcn.sh
A record of the updates is kept in update_log.txt.
Data location¶
We’ve downloaded GHCN data to:
/g/data/ia39/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/ghcn/data/daily/by_year
The files are ascii format: YYYY.csv
The files format is described in /g/data/ia39/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/ghcn/code/ghcn-daily-by_year-format.txt
License¶
Data is freely available but there are restrictions on commercial use, from their data access policy:
“Some of the data provided here are based on data exchanged under the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) World Weather Watch Program according to WMO Resolution 40 (Cg-XII). This allows WMO member countries to place restrictions on the use or re-export of their data for commercial purposes outside of the receiving country. Those country’s data summaries and products which are available here are intended for free and unrestricted use in research, education, and other non-commercial activities. For non-U.S. locations, the data or any derived product shall not be provided to other users or be used for their re-export for commercial services.”
Data citation¶
Menne MJ, Durre I, Korzeniewski B, McNeal S, Thomas K, Yin X, Anthony S, Ray R, Vose RS, Gleason BE, and Houston TG (2012). Global Historical Climatology Network - Daily (GHCN-Daily), Version 3. [indicate subset used following decimal, e.g. Version 3.12]. NOAA National Climatic Data Center. http://doi.org/10.7289/V5D21VHZ [access date].
References¶
Menne MJ, Durre I, Vose RS, Gleason BE, and Houston TG (2012). An overview of the Global Historical Climatology Network-Daily Database. Journal of Atmospheric and Oceanic Technology, 29, 897-910. https://doi.org/10.1175/JTECH-D-11-00103.1
Acknowledgement¶
No statement provided.
Assistance¶
For assistance with GHCN data on NCI, open a new issue at https://github.com/aus-ref-clim-data-nci/GHCN/issues