National Weather Service United States Department of Commerce

Gridded Temperature

April 8, 2008: Note that revised gridded temperature data are now available for 1987 to 2002. The original temperature data had errors from two sources: 1) the time stamp on each hourly file was wrong by one hour, and 2) errors resulting from the use of different codes for missing data in the SNOTEL archives. The revised data has been corrected for these two errors.

The hourly temperature grids are derived from daily minimum and maximum temperature records of gages. (List of the stations used). The method used to compute hourly temperatures form daily minimum and maximum temperatures is described by (Ref). Preliminary evaluation of the data has shown that the derived hourly temperatures are reasonable.

As in the case of precipitation, the temperature values are stored in XMRG format. The same scale factor (100) is used so that same routines to convert precipitation XMRG formats to ASCII can be used for temperature files as well. Note that the temperature values are in Degrees Fahrenheit. To get more information on the spatial extent of the data (same as for the precipitation data) click here. For information on the XMRG file format click here.

To obtain the hourly gridded temperature click here

Codes to Display Precipitation and Temperature Data

We have developed kml codes to display the DMIP 2 gridded precipitation and temperature data in Google Earth. These codes and documentation are available for use by DMIP 2 participants on the following ftp site:

ftp://hydrology.nws.noaa.gov/pub/dmip2/Hydro_Data/western_basins/precip/

The file name is:

xmrgtokml.dmip2.tar.gz

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