Global Historical Climatology Network

From ClimateWiki

The Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) is a database of temperature, precipitation and pressure records managed by the National Climatic Data Center, Arizona State University and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center.

The aggregate data are collected from many continuously reporting fixed stations at the Earth's surface and represent the input of approximately:

• 6000 temperature stations
• 7500 precipitation stations
• 2000 pressure stations

This work is often used as a foundation for reconstructing past global temperatures, and is used in two of the official reconstructions, that prepared by the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and that prepared by NASA as its Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) temperature set. The average temperature record is 60 years long with ~1650 records greater than 100 years and ~220 greater than 150 years (based on GHCN v2 in 2006). The earliest data included in the database were collected in 1697.

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_Historical_Climatology_Network