A Databank of Antarctic Surface Temperature and Pressure Data (NDP-032)
- University of East Anglia, Climatic Research Unit
- British Antarctic Survey
This database contains monthly mean surface temperature and mean sea level pressure data from twenty-nine meteorological stations within the Antarctic region. The first version of this database was compiled at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom. The database extended through 1988 and was made available in 1989 by the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) as a Numeric Data Package (NDP), NDP-032. This update of the database includes data through early 1999 for most stations (through 2000 for a few), and also includes all available mean monthly maximum and minimum temperature data. For many stations this means that over 40 years of data are now available, enough for many of the trends associated with recent warming to be more thoroughly examined. Much of the original version of this dataset was obtained from the World Weather Records (WWR) volumes (1951-1970), Monthly Climatic Data for the World (since 1961), and several other sources. Updating the station surface data involved requesting data from countries who have weather stations on Antarctica. Of particular importance within this study are the additional data obtained from Australia, Britain and New Zealand. Recording Antarctic station data is particularly prone to errors. This is mostly due to climatic extremes, the nature of Antarctic science, and the variability of meteorological staff at Antarctic stations (high turnover and sometimes untrained meteorological staff). For this compilation, as many sources as possible were contacted in order to obtain as close to official `source' data as possible. Some error checking has been undertaken and hopefully the final result is as close to a definitive database as possible. This NDP consists of this html documentation file, an ASCII text version of this file, six temperature files (three original CRU files for monthly maximum, monthly minimum, and monthly mean temperature and three equivalent files slightly reformatted at CDIAC), two monthly mean pressure data files (one original CRU file and one slightly reformatted CDIAC version of the file), four graphics files that describe the station network and the nature of temperature and pressure trends, a file summarizing annual and mean-monthly trends in surface temperatures over Antarctica, a file summarizing monthly Antarctic surface temperature anomalies with respect to the period 1961-90, a station inventory file, and 3 FORTRAN and 3 SAS routines for reading the data that may be incorporated into analysis programs that users may devise. These 23 files have a total size of approximately 2 megabytes and are available via the Internet through CDIAC's Web site or anonymous FTP (File Transfer Protocol) server, and, upon request, various magnetic media.For access to the data files, click this link to the CDIAC data transition website: http://cdiac.ess-dive.lbl.gov/epubs/ndp/ndp032/ndp032.htmlThis dataset was transferred from the CDIAC Archive and published on ESS-DIVE in 2018 under the project title "Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC), Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States); University of East Anglia, Norwich, United Kingdom". In 2023, the project title was updated to "Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC); Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), Oak Ridge, TN (United States)" to enable consistent management of all datasets previously hosted by the CDIAC Archive that are now published on ESS-DIVE.
- Research Organization:
- Environmental System Science Data Infrastructure for a Virtual Ecosystem (ESS-DIVE) (United States)
- Sponsoring Organization:
- U.S. DOE > Office of Science (SC) > Biological and Environmental Research (BER) (SC-23)
- OSTI ID:
- 1394934
- Report Number(s):
- osti:1394934; doi:10.3334/CDIAC/CLI.NDP032; cdiac:doi 10.3334/CDIAC/cli.ndp032
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
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