NERC Data Catalogue Service
WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Rainf GPCC (Rainfall GPCC) 1901-2001
The WATCH forcing data (WFD) is a twentieth century meteorological forcing dataset for land surface and hydrological models. It consists of three/six-hourly states of the weather for global half-degree land grid points.
It was generated as part of the EU FP 6 project "WATCH" (WATer and global CHange") which ran from 2007-2011. The data was generated in 2 tranches with slightly different methodology: 1901-1957 and 1958-2001, but generally the dataset can be considered as continuous. More details regarding the generation process can be found in the associated WATCH technical report and paper in J. Hydrometeorology. To understand how the data grid is formed it is necessary to read the attached WFD-land-long-lat-z files either in NetCDF or dat formats. The data covers land points only and excludes the Antarctica. Rainf or rainfall rate is the rainfall rate based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) bias corrected, undercatch corrected measured in kg/m2/s at 3 hourly resolution averaged over the next 3 hours and at 0.5 x 0.5 degrees spatial resolution. Please note that there is also a WFD Rainf CRU bias corrected dataset, but as the GPCC dataset is the preferred dataset only this rainfall dataset is available from the EIDC. These rainfall datasets contain rainfall data only and need to be combined with the respective WFD snowfall datasets to obtain precipitation data.
Default
Identification info
- Metadata Language
- English (en)
- Character set
- utf8
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 2011-08-01
- Identifier
- CEH:EIDC: / 1315215051950
- Maintenance and update frequency
- notPlanned
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ()
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- Atmospheric Conditions
- Meteorological geographical features
- Keywords
-
- Modelling
- Hydrology
- Land surface modelling
- meteorology
- atmosphere
- Limitations on Public Access
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- no limitations
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- Licence terms and conditions apply
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- Please note that these data are based on climate reanalysis data, plus a spatial interpolation (from one-degree to half-degree), elevation correction and monthly-correction based on gridded observations. As such the WATCH Forcing data are designed for use in modelling (e.g. hydrological modelling) and for where good meteorological observations are not readily available.
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- Please reference the use of the WATCH forcing data in any work published using doi:10.1175/2011JHM1369.1
- Spatial representation type
- grid
- Distance
- 30 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
- Topic category
-
- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
))
- Begin date
- 1900-12-01
- End date
- 2002-01-31
- Code
- WGS 84
Distribution Information
- Data format
-
-
netCDF
()
-
netCDF
()
- Resource Locator
-
Data download
Download a copy of this data
- Resource Locator
-
Supporting information
Documents available to assist with re-use of this dataset
- Resource Locator
-
Data download
Download a copy of this data
- Resource Locator
-
Supporting information
Documents available to assist with re-use of this dataset
- Quality Scope
- dataset
- Other
- dataset
Report
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 2010-12-08
- Statement
- These data were created as part of the EU FP6 project WATCH which was coordinated by NERC-CEH and ran from 2007-2011. The data were generated in two tranches according to time interval. The data from 1958-2001 were based on ECMWF (European Centre for Medium Range Weather Forecasting) "ERA-40" reanalysis data via interpolation, elevation correction and monthly bias correction from gridded observations. The data from 1901-1957 were created via re-ordering of the ERA-40 reanalysis one year at a time. For full details of the process see the WATCH technical report No 22 and Weedon (2011, J. Hydrometeorology).
Metadata
- File identifier
- 6b7caa4f-4e35-4c79-aa8e-2e065234a14a XML
- Metadata Language
- English (en)
- Character set
- ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1)
- Resource type
- dataset
- Hierarchy level name
- dataset
- Metadata Date
- 2021-06-25T18:41:29
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
- 2.3
