1. GHCN-Daily: a treasure trove of climate data awaiting discovery
- Author
-
Jasmine B.D. Jaffrés
- Subjects
Structure (mathematical logic) ,Computer science ,media_common.quotation_subject ,0208 environmental biotechnology ,02 engineering and technology ,010502 geochemistry & geophysics ,Data structure ,01 natural sciences ,Data science ,020801 environmental engineering ,Weather station ,Data retrieval ,GNU Octave ,Quality (business) ,Computers in Earth Sciences ,Treasure ,Scale (map) ,computer ,0105 earth and related environmental sciences ,Information Systems ,computer.programming_language ,media_common - Abstract
International collaboration to create and maintain international, freely accessible datasets greatly facilitates research in many scientific fields. The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN)-Daily database provides access to a diverse range of daily weather station data, including precipitation and temperature variables. These data are supplied as individual, station-specific files and structured in a non-delimited format. Here, the GHCN-Daily data structure, spatio-temporal content and associated caveats are delineated. The regularly updated collection now features data from over 100 000 stations in 218 countries and territories. While rigorous quality tests are routinely applied for GHCN-Daily, the database excludes the original quality flags from the source agencies. The extraction of climate variables from the GHCN-Daily database can be challenging for novice users and may thus dissuade from the uptake of this valuable dataset. Consequently, a user-friendly toolkit for MATLAB and GNU Octave is also provided to aid data retrieval from all relevant weather stations. The toolkit reformats the extracted GHCN-Daily data into a more accessible structure to facilitate data mining and research on a large scale.
- Published
- 2019