Daily meteorological data of precipitation, temperature and wind speed are needed to determine gauge catch rations. A global daily surface data archive for over 8,000 stations around the world has been acquired from the National Climatic Data Center (http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/res40.pl). The data are available from 1973 to 2004. For some periods (days and weeks) data may not be available due to data restrictions or communication problems. Data from 1982 to 2004 are the most complete. Quality control of the daily data has been performed by NCDC (readme from NCDC). We have used all available daily records for this analysis.

To focus our effort on the high latitude regions, a subset of the global daily data, 4802 stations located north of 45N with data records longer-than 15 years during 1973-2004, was created and used for this analysis. This spatial coverage was chosen to specifically include the source areas of the largest northern flowing rivers - the Ob, Yenisei, and Lena in Siberia, and the Mackenzie in Canada. These long-term data enable us to develop more reliable precipitation climatologies, and to examine, for the first time, the impact of bias corrections on precipitation trend analyses in the northern regions. Additional metadata and information were obtained from the WMO and relevant national weather services. Combinations of meteorological data and the station metadata satisfy the data requirements for daily precipitation corrections in the northern regions.

Bias-corrections of daily precipitation data at the stations produce improved monthly and yearly precipitation time series during 1973-2004. Details of the correction methods and results have been discussed in a recent publication (Yang, D., D. Kane, Z. Zhang, D. Legates and B. Goodison, 2005: Bias-corrections of long-term (1973-2004) daily precipitation data over the northern regions, Geophysical Research Letters, vol. 32, L19501, doi:10.1029/2005GL024057) [ pdf ] .

Here monthly data for the stations are provided, accompanied with readme file, and daily data will be available upon request. The gridded monthly data will become available soon.

Information on stations location is available here and file structure is described here