JISAO data
University of East Anglia land precipitation, 1900-98

Analyses | Data
Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia (UEA) has produced two global precipitation data sets, and the data set offered on this WWW page is the 2.5 by 3.75 degree latitude-longitude resolution data for 1900-98.

Global domain
PostScript | JPEG The Northern Hemisphere extratropics are well sampled, while the tropics less well so.

As examples of the analyses that can be performed with this data, precipitation anomalies are correlated with an indicator of the El Niño / Southern Oscillation, and the analysis is provided for 1900-49 and 1950-98.

Global domain
PostScript | JPEG

Global domain
PostScript | JPEG
A netCDF file of the digital values of these two analyses is linked here.
Data:
  • ASCII format available from the UEA WWW page.
  • At JISAO, the netCDF version is available on /home/disk/tao/data/gridded_land_precip/cru/guwld230098.nc
  • netCDF format
    All errors in the netCDF file are due to Todd Mitchell. If you use the netCDF files, please send an email to Mike Hulme ( m.hulme@uea.ac.uk ). Thank you.

    Climatology for 1950-79: monthly and seasonal means, and annual total. All errors in the climatology are due to Todd Mitchell.

  • At JISAO, /home/disk/tao/data/gridded_land_precip/cru/precip23cruclim.nc
  • netCDF file The "history" variable describes the order of the maps.

    References:

  • Hulme, M., 1992: A 1951-80 global land precipitation climatology for the evaluation of general circulation models. Climate Dynamics, 7, 57-72.
  • _____, 1994: Validation of large-scale precipitation fields in general circulation models. Global Precipitation and Climate Change, M. Desbois and F. Desalmand, Eds., NATO ASI Series, Springer-Verlag, 387-406.
  • _____, T. J. Osborn, and T. C. Johns, 1998: Precipitation sensitivity to global warming: comparison of observations with HadCM2 simulations. Geophys. Res. Lett., 25, 3379-3382.

    March 2002
    Todd Mitchell ( mitchell@atmos.washington.edu )
    JISAO data