JISAO data

National Centers for Environmental Prediction (NCEP) Climate Prediction Center "unified" daily precipitation for the contiguous United States, 1948-98

NCEP has a nice WWW page that describes just what this data set is and how it was created. The complete data set is too large to be useful, so I have made to two versions which are smaller (<100 Mb). One is for just the Pacific Northwest domain (40-50N,125-110W) at the original 0.25-degree latitude-longitude resolution, and the second is a 1-degree latitude-longitude resolution version for the contiguous U.S.

1948 total precipitation for 
the contiguous U.S.
PostScript | JPEG
The heaviest rainfall, in excess of 100 inches, is found along the Washington coast, and rainfall in excess of 60 inches throughout Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia. The shading over the ocean regions gives you a sense of the spatial scale of the smoothing employed in the analysis.


Data:
All of the data sets are for 1948-98. Updated data is available from NCEP.
  • NOAA CDC has daily data for individual years in netCDF as well as monthly means of this data.
  • At JISAO, the data are at /home/disk/muggy/data/daily_obs/ncep_gridded/
    Errors in the netCDF files are due to Todd Mitchell.
    Pacific Northwest (40-50N,125-110W) (93 Mb)
    Pacific Northwest land mask
    Contiguous U.S. at 1-degree resolution(66 Mb)
    Contiguous U.S. land mask


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