NDP-048/R1

Six- and Three-Hourly Meteorological Observations from 223 U.S.S.R. Stations (1998)

V. N. Razuvayev, E. G. Apasova, and R. A. Martuganov

DOI: 10.3334/CDIAC/cli.ndp048

This database contains 6- and 3-hourly meteorological observations from a 223-station network of the former Soviet Union. These data have been made available through cooperation between the two principal climate data centers of the United States and the former Soviet Union: the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), in Asheville, North Carolina, and the All-Russian Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information--World Data Centre (RIHMI-WDC) in Obninsk, Russia. The first version of this database extended through the mid-1980s (ending year dependent upon station) and was made available in 1995 by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) as NDP-048. This update of the database includes data through 1990. Station records consist of 6- and 3-hourly observations of some 24 meteorological variables including temperature, past and present weather type, precipitation amount, cloud amount and type, sea level pressure, relative humidity, and wind direction and speed. The 6-hourly observations extend from 1936 through 1965; the 3-hourly observations extend from 1966 through 1990. These data have undergone extensive quality assurance checks by RIHMI-WDC, NCDC, and CDIAC. The database represents a wealth of meteorological information for a large and climatologically important portion of the earth's land area, and should prove extremely useful for a wide variety of regional climate change studies.

This NDP consists of a printed document detailing the initial version of the database that extended through the mid-1980s, 15 updated data retrieval and documentation files, and 223 data files updated through 1990 (one per station; ~2.9 gigabytes in uncompressed form) that are available via the Internet through CDIAC's Web site or anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server, and upon request, various magnetic media.

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