Global Daily Climatology Network CD-ROM (GDCN)

Global Daily Climatology Network is digital data set DSI-9101, archived at the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC). It is also available to customers on CD-ROM. The Global Daily Climatology Network (GDCN) represents a compilation of global daily timescale data into a single and consistent format. The data set will serve the needs of researchers, weather-sensitive businesses, agriculture, and policy makers whose are dependent upon complete and accurate analysis of daily temperature and precipitation. Prior to the GDCN, those with an interest in daily data were forced to search multiple data sets and often perform many of the time consuming pre-processing tasks, necessary for the creation of a high quality data set. Major parameters are maximum and minimum temperature, and precipitation. The geographic area is global, and includes among other things a large amount of data from the former Soviet Union. Over 30,000 weather stations around the world are represented. The data period of record varies by station, but the earliest data is from March 1840. Data within the GDCN have been extensively checked through a series of quality control procedures to ensure erroneous values have been removed and/or identified. The GDCN has over 800 million days of weather data, and that number is expected to increase as the GDCN expands in the future. The 2 disk CD-ROM set available to customers from the NCDC includes the data, plus metadata information for all stations. In addition, users will find complete documentation available in three popular document formats (.wpd, .doc, and .pdf). NOTE: This CD-ROM set does not contain import and/or extraction software for processing the data.