New Datasets and Features

The Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) Full Data Product Version 6 monthly precipitation analysis based upon station precipitation data has been added.

We lost our previous source of Reanalysis II, and have written a new entry which provides the monthly version from an alternate source. Please let us know if there are any issues.

The Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) monthly precipitation Monitoring Product Version 4 and the monthly precipitation climatology Normals Version 2011 global gridded precipitation analyses based upon station precipitation data have been added.

The CPC/FEWS Africa Rainfall Climatology Version 2 dataset contains daily precipitation estimates over the African continent at 0.1 deg. lat/lon resolution. Version 2 begins in 1983 and is updated in near real-time. The daily estimates are based upon geostationary IR satellite data and quality controlled gauge observations from the GTS.

The latest version (version 2.2) of NASA's Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) monthly precipitation data set has been added to the Data Library. The product includes multiple estimated precipitation variables and error estimates derived from various combinations of IR and microwave satellite and gauge observations.

The Climate Prediction Center (CPC) Unified Gauge-Based Analysis of Global Daily Precipitation is an optimal interpolation objective analysis of global daily station precipitation data available at the CPC. It is divided into a retrospective version (RETRO) covering 1979 to 2005, derived from more than 30,000 gauges, and a real-time version (REALTIME) covering 2006 to present, derived from approximately 17,000 gauges. The grid resolution is 0.5 deg. lat/lon. The data set also includes information on the gauge network density and country-to-country variations in the daily reporting period.

Climate Forecast System Version2 is now available as both hindcasts and realtime updates. 9-month hindcasts initiated from every 5th day and run from all 4 cycles of that day, beginning from Jan 1 of each year, over a 29 year period from 1982-2010. These hindcasts are available either as monthly sets of 24-28 ensemble members (ENSEMBLE), or starts every 5 days of four ensemble members (MONTHLY). Realtime updates are daily starts of four ensemble members (MONTHLY_REALTIME).

GPCC Monitoring Product Version 3, GPCC Normals Version 2010, and the GPCC Full Data Reanalysis Version 5 global gridded precipitation analyses based upon station precipitation data have been added.

The latest monthly (January 2011) release of the CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation (CMAP) has been added.

The OSU PRISM (Parameter-elevation Regressions on Independent Slopes Model) Analysis of United States Precipitation and Temperature has been updated through Dec 2010, and will be automatically updated each month in the future. PRISM is a knowledge-based system that uses point measurements of precipitation, temperature, and other climatic factors to produce continuous, digital grid estimates of monthly, yearly, and event-based climatic parameters.

World Ocean Atlas 2009 (WOA09), from the U. S. National Oceanographic Data Center, is a set of objectively analyzed (1 degree latitude/longitude grid) climatological fields of in situ temperature, salinity, dissolved oxygen, Apparent Oxygen Utilization (AOU), percent oxygen saturation, phosphate, silicate, and nitrate at standard depth levels for annual, seasonal, and monthly compositing periods for the World Ocean. It also includes associated statistical fields of observed oceanographic profile data interpolated to standard depth levels on both 1 degee and 5 degree latitude/longitude grids .

NOAA ESRL 20th Century Reanalysis Version 2 six-hourly data for 1871-2008. The analysis is performed with the Ensemble Filter as described in Compo et al. (2006) based on the method of Whitaker and Hamill (2002). Observations of surface pressure and sea level pressure from the International Surface Pressure Databank station component version 2 (Gleason et al. 2008), ICOADS (Woodruff et al. 2009), and the International Best Track Archive for Climatic Stewardship (IBTrACS, Kruk et al. 2010) were assimilated every six hours.

The IRI Server now has a local copy of all the mean fields; the IRI copy of the spread will be extended as needed. This should address some of the performance problems we were having.

The combined instrument rain calibration algorithm (3B-42) uses an optimal combination of 2B-31, 2A-12, SSMI, AMSR and AMSU precipitation estimates (referred to as HQ), to adjust IR estimates from geostationary IR observations. Near-global estimates are made by calibrating the IR brightness temperatures to the HQ estimates.

NOAA ESRL 20th Century Reanalysis Version 2 six-hourly data for 1891-2008. The analysis is performed with the Ensemble Filter as described in Compo et al. (2006) based on the method of Whitaker and Hamill (2002). Observations of surface pressure and sea level pressure from the International Surface Pressure Databank station component version 2 (Gleason et al. 2008), ICOADS (Woodruff et al. 2009), and the International Best Track Archive for Climatic Stewardship (IBTrACS, Kruk et al. 2010) were assimilated every six hours.

The latest monthly (January 2010) and pentad (November 2009) releases of the CPC Merged Analysis of Precipitation (CMAP) have been added.

MODIS version 005 reflectivity, NDVI, and EVI data at 250-meter resolution for Alaska, Canada, and southern North America have been added.

Terra MODIS Version 005 1-km, 8-day composite land surface temperature (LST) data for New York state added

The CCM3v6 model forced by constructed-analogue SST has been updated from January 2003 through January 2010. It will be updated monthly from this time forward.

The Climate Prediction Center's GHCN-CAMS global monthly gridded (0.5 degree lat./lon. resolution) land-only surface air temperature data set has been added. It includes monthly surface air temperature data from January 1948 to the present and is updated in real time. This product is an analysis based upon station data from both the Global Historical Climatology Network version 2 (GHCN) and the Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (CAMS).

The latest version (version 2.1) of NASA's Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) monthly precipitation data set has been added to the Data Library. The product includes multiple estimated precipitation variables and error estimates derived from various combinations of IR and microwave satellite and gauge observations. The satellite-gauge product is updated from time to time with more recent observations.

The average operator normally removes each independent variable that is averaged over, so that, for example, a mean can easily be removed from an entire time series. But there is now a /keepgrids option, which keeps the independent variable as a single point grid. This is most useful for downloading to software that insists on a time grid.

Real-time NOAA Climate Forecast System (CFS) data added

NOAA ESRL 20th Century Reanalysis Version 1 monthly data for 1908-1958.

Beijing Climate Center coupled GCM monthly pressure-level U and V winds and precipitation output for 48 ensemble members added.

MODIS Version 005 1-km, 8-day composite land surface temperature (LST) data for Africa and South America added

12-member ensemble monthly retrospective coupled model forecasts for 1982-2006 have been added to the Data Library.

New searching options are available in the "Browse/Search Datasets" search tool.

It replaces the ERSSTv3, which is no longer being updated