The Global Historical Climatology Network Precipitation Dataset: Version 3

The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) monthly precipitation dataset contains historical time series for thousands of land surface stations worldwide. Initially released in 1992 (version 1) and revised in 1997 (version 2), the dataset has been employed in a wide variety of applications over the past two decades, including operational monitoring, applied research, and international assessments (e.g., several IPCC reports). This paper will describe the data and methods used to compile the latest edition (version 3), which is currently in production.

Scheduled for release in 2015, version 3 will have three major enhancements. The first enhancement will be to the station network itself, which will increase in size by at least a factor of three (i.e., to over 75,000 stations) due to the inclusion of dozens of new source datasets, most notably GHCN-Daily. The second enhancement will be to the operational processing system, which will consist of over 25 new quality assurance reviews leveraged off of GHCN-Daily and other existing operational systems. The third enhancement will be to the monthly gridded fields, which will have higher spatial resolution and other new monitoring-driven functionality.