Extended Edited Synoptic Cloud Reports from Ships and Land Stations Over the Globe, 1952-2009 (NDP-026C)
Original Documentation / Update (2012) Documentation / Data Files
Investigators
C. J. Hahn
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences,
University of Arizona
S. G. Warren
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences,
University of Washington
R. Eastman
Dept. of Atmospheric Sciences,
University of Washington
DOI
10.3334/CDIAC/cli.ndp026c
Description
This database contains surface synoptic weather reports for the entire globe, gathered from various available data sets. The reports were processed, edited, and rewritten to provide a single dataset of individual observations of clouds, spanning the 57 years 1952-2008 for ship data and the 39 years 1971-2009 for land station data. In addition to the cloud portion of the synoptic report, each edited report also includes the associated pressure, present weather, wind, air temperature, and dew point (and sea surface temperature over oceans). This data set is called the "Extended Edited Cloud Report Archive" (EECRA).
The EECRA is based solely on visual cloud observations from weather stations, reported in the WMO synoptic code (WMO, 1974). Reports must contain cloud-type information to be included in the archive. Past data sources include those from the Fleet Numerical Oceanographic Center (FNOC, 1971-1976) and the National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP, 1977-1996). This update uses data from a new source, the 'Integrated Surface Database' (ISD, 1997-2009; Smith et al., 2011). Our past analyses of the EECRA identified a subset of 5388 weather stations that were determined to produce reliable day and night observations of cloud amount and type. The update contains observations only from this subset of stations. Details concerning processing, previous problems, contents, and comments are available in the archive's original documentation .
The EECRA contains about 81 million cloud observations from ships and 380 million from land stations. The data files have been compressed using unix. Unix/linux users can "uncompress" or "gunzip" the files after downloading.
If you're interested in the NDP-026C database, then you'll also want to explore its related data products, NDP-026D and NDP-026E.
References