On behalf of the Pacific GIS and Remote Sensing Council (PGRSC), we welcome you to Week 9 of our series to promote free GIS and remote sensing resources (webinars, instructional videos, technical manuals, e-books, etc.) to increase capacity, awareness, and skill development for the Pacific Islands geospatial community. Last week, we introduced the WorldClim project – a free online database of high spatial resolution global weather and climate data that can be used for mapping and spatial modeling. This week we will explore another resource for weather and climate data – the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN) dataset.
Week 9: Are you interested in accessing historical and current temperature and precipitation data across the globe? NOAA NCEI’s Global Historical Climatology Network daily (GHCNd) is an integrated database of daily climate summaries from land surface stations worldwide. GHCNd contains daily records from more than 100,000 stations in 180 countries and territories. NOAA NCEI provides numerous daily variables, including maximum and minimum temperature, total daily precipitation, snowfall, and snow depth. The length and period of record vary by station and cover (many but not all Pacific Island countries are represented) but data range from less than a year to more than 175 years old.
The NOAA NCEI GHCN Daily Weather Data can be found at:
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/products/land-based-station/global-historical-climatology-network-daily
https://www.ncei.noaa.gov/cdo-web
We hope that these materials are beneficial to you. Please let us know if you have a free GIS or remote sensing resource that you would like to promote as well so others can learn from them.