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    • Global Monthly Climatology for the Twentieth Century (New et al.)

    Metadata Updated: July 10, 2025

    This is a data set of mean monthly surface climate data over global land areas, excluding Antarctica, for nearly all of the twentieth century. The data set is gridded at 0.5 degree latitude/longitude resolution and includes seven variables: precipitation, mean temperature, diurnal temperature range, wet-day frequency, vapour pressure, cloud cover, and ground-frost frequency. All variables have mean monthly values for the period 1901-1995, several have data as recent as 1998, and more data will be added by the data originators. In constructing the monthly grids the authors used an anomaly approach which attempts to maximize station data in space and time (New et al., 2000). In this technique, grids of monthly historic anomalies are derived relative to a standard normal period. Station measurement data for the years 1961-1990, extracted from the monthly data holdings of the Climatic Research Unit and the Global Historic Climatology Network (GHCN), served as the normal period (New et al., 1999). The anomaly grids were then combined with high-resolution mean monthly climatology to arrive at fields of estimated historical monthly surface climate. Data users are encouraged to see the companion file New et al. (2000) for a complete description of this technique and potential applications and limitations of the data set. For additional information, refer to the IPCC Data Distribution Centre. Access to the complete year-by-year monthly data set or to data more recent than posted here can be achieved by making a request with the Climate Impacts LINK Project at the Climatic Research Unit (email: d.viner@uea.ac.uk, web site: www.cru.uea.ac.uk/link ).

    Access & Use Information

    Public: This dataset is intended for public access and use. License: No license information was provided. If this work was prepared by an officer or employee of the United States government as part of that person's official duties it is considered a U.S. Government Work.

    Downloads & Resources

    Dates

    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date July 10, 2025

    Metadata Source

    Harvested from NASA Data.json

    Other Data Resources

    Additional Metadata

    Resource Type Dataset
    Metadata Created Date April 11, 2025
    Metadata Updated Date July 10, 2025
    Publisher ORNL_DAAC
    Maintainer
    Identifier 10.3334/ORNLDAAC/551
    Data Last Modified 2025-07-09
    Category Earth Science
    Public Access Level public
    Bureau Code 026:00
    Metadata Context https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.jsonld
    Schema Version https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema
    Catalog Describedby https://project-open-data.cio.gov/v1.1/schema/catalog.json
    Harvest Object Id 75a3bcf5-b9e6-4585-a77f-bcf00a7d446e
    Harvest Source Id 58f92550-7a01-4f00-b1b2-8dc953bd598f
    Harvest Source Title NASA Data.json
    Old Spatial {"WestBoundingCoordinate":-180.0,"NorthBoundingCoordinate":90.0,"EastBoundingCoordinate":180.0,"SouthBoundingCoordinate":-90.0},"CARTESIAN"
    Program Code 026:000
    Source Datajson Identifier True
    Source Hash f5b67000b598c07ded6e8da5b39aa2c637455d346b7c7b416958682825042025
    Source Schema Version 1.1
    Spatial

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