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NOAA CPC (Climate Prediction Center) .25x.25 Daily US UNIFIED Precipitation

Please redownload the monthly precipitation if you acquired it before Jun 14 2016. There was an error in the mean calculation for some months.

Brief Description:

• High resolution gridded precipitation over the US (from station data) for 1948 to 2006 extending to the present for a real-time version. More Details...

Temporal Coverage:

• Daily 1948/01/01 to 2006/12/31: measurement accumulated to 12z of the day
• Daily RT 2007/01/01 to 2021/09/19 .
• Monthly 1948/01 to 2015/12.

Spatial Coverage:

• 0.25 - degree latitude x 0.25 - degree longitude US grid (300x120).
• 20.0N - 50.0N, 230.0E - 305.0E.

Levels:

• N/A

Update Schedule:

• Daily

Download/Plot Data: (FTP Access)

Variable	Statistic	Level	Download File	Create Plot/Subset
Precipitation	Daily Total	Surface	See List
' '	Monthly Total	Surface	precip.V1.0.mon.mean.nc
Precipitation	Daily Long Term Mean	Surface	precip.V1.0.day.ltm.nc
' '	Monthly Long Term Mean	Surface	precip.V1.0.mon.ltm.nc
Land-Sea Mask	time-invariant	Surface	lsmask.nc

Usage Restrictions:

• None

Detailed Description:

• This data set is part of products suite from the CPC Unified Precipitation Project that are underway at NOAA Climate Prediction Center (CPC). The primary goal of the project is to create a suite of unified precipitation products with consistent quantity and improved quality by combining all information sources available at CPC and by taking advantage of the optimal interpolation (OI) objective analysis technique. The gauge analysis here covers the Conteminous United States on a fine-resolution and is quantitatively consistent with that covering the global land on a coarser resolution. See their CPC's data docs for more details.

  Landmask is such that actual data resides between 20N-49.5N (lat grids 1-118) and 233.75E to 292.75 (lon grids 56-292). The PSL files are stored using the landmask to mask out areas that aren't land

  Values are for over the continental US. Data is daily from 1948-2006. Values are accumulated from 12z of the day before to 12z of the day (with no missing grids ).A land-sea mask is supplied.

• Real Time data is available for 2007 to present. The is not produced exactly the same way as the data before 1999.

Caveats:

• None

Related File Naming & Structure Information:

File Names:

• precip.V1.0.yyyy.nc for daily  (In directory: /Datasets/cpc_us_precip/)Note file name change
• 2007+ in directory: /Datasets/cpc_us_precip/RT/)
• precip.time,statistic.nc for monthly, long term means  (In directory: /Datasets/cpc_us_precip/)

OpenDap File Names:

• /thredds/dodsC/Datasets/cpc_us_precip/precip.V1.0.yyyy.nc for daily  

Dataset Format and Size:

• PSL standard NetCDF 37 Mbyte file for each yearly file (packed).
• PSL standard NetCDF 37 Mbyte file for each daily long term mean file (packed).
• PSL standard NetCDF 62 Mbyte file for each monthly file (packed).
• PSL standard NetCDF 1 Mbyte file for each monthly long term mean file (packed).

Missing Data:

• No missing data.

Citation:

• Please note: If you acquire CPC US Unified Precipitation data products from PSL, we ask that you acknowledge us in your use of the data. This may be done by including text such as CPC US Unified Precipitation data provided by the NOAA/OAR/ESRL PSL, Boulder, Colorado, USA, from their Web site at / in any documents or publications using these data. We would also appreciate receiving a copy of the relevant publications. This will help PSL to justify keeping the CPC US Unified Precipitation data set freely available online in the future. Thank you!

References:

• (Interpolation algorithm) Xie_et_al_2007_JHM_EAG.pdf Xie, P., A. Yatagai, M. Chen, T. Hayasaka, Y. Fukushima, C. Liu, and S. Yang (2007), A gauge-based analysis of daily precipitation over East Asia, J. Hydrometeorol., 8, 607. 626.
• (Gauge Algorithm Evaluation) Chen_et_al_2008_JGR_Gauge_Algo.pdf Chen, M., W. Shi, P. Xie, V. B. S. Silva, V E. Kousky, R. Wayne Higgins, and J. E. Janowiak (2008), Assessing objective techniques for gauge-based analyses of global daily precipitation, J. Geophys. Res., 113, D04110, doi:10.1029/2007JD009132.
• (Construction of the Daily Gauge Analysis) Chen_et_al_2008_Daily_Gauge_Anal.pdf Chen, M., P. Xie, and Co-authors (2008), CPC Unified Gauge-based Analysis of Global Daily Precipiation, Western Pacific Geophysics Meeting, Cairns, Australia, 29 July - 1 August, 2008.

Original Source:

• From CPC's FTP directories.
• CPC's webpage with the latest images is available.
• See README. Dr. Pingping Xie, Dr. Wei Shi, and Dr. Mingyue Chen at Climate Prediction Center 5200 Auth Road, #605 . .

Contact:

• Physical Sciences Laboratory: Data Management
  NOAA/ESRL/PSL
  325 Broadway
  Boulder, CO 80305-3328
  psl.data@noaa.gov