LBA Regional Global Historical Climatology Network, V. 1, 1832-1990

Each station has at least 10 years of data; 40% have more than 50 years of data. Spatial coverage is good over most of the globe, particularly for the United States and Europe. Data gaps are evident over the Amazon rainforest, the Sahara desert, Greenland, and Antarctica.

The earliest station data are from 1697; the most recent are from 1990. The database was created from 15 source data sets including:The National Climatic Data Center's (NCDC's) World Weather Records,CAC's Climate Anomaly Monitoring System (CAMS),NCAR's World Monthly Surface Station Climatology,CIRES' (Eischeid/Diaz) Global precipitation data set,P. Jones' Temperature data base for the world, andS. Nicholson's African precipitation database.

Quality Control of the GHCN V1 database included visual inspection of graphs of all station time series, tests for precipitation digitized 6 months out of phase, tests for different stations having identical data, and other tests. This detailed analysis has revealed that most stations (95% for temperature and precipitation, 75% for pressure) contain high-quality data. However, gross data-processing errors (e.g., keypunch problems) and discontinuous inhomogeneities (e.g., station relocations and instrumentation changes) do characterize a small number of stations.

All major data processing problems have been flagged (or corrected, when possible). Similarly, all major inhomogeneities have been flagged, although no homogeneity corrections were applied.LBA was designed to create the new knowledge needed to understand the climatological, ecological, biogeochemical, and hydrological functioning of Amazonia; the impact of land use change on these functions; and the interactions between Amazonia and the Earth system.

LBA was a cooperative international research initiative led by Brazil and NASA was a lead sponsor for several experiments. More information about LBA and links to other LBA project sites can be found at daac.ornl.gov/LBA/misc_amazon.html.