Gridded Meteorological Data

University of Washington

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Surface Water Modeling Group
 

Data Set: Temporally adjusted daily 1/8-degree gridded meteorological data [1 Jan 1915 - 31 Dec 2003]

Citation: If you acquire data from this web site, we request that you please acknowledge this by including text such as: Daily gridded meteorological data obtained from the Surface Water Modeling group at the University of Washington from their web site at http://www.hydro.washington.edu/Lettenmaier/Data/gridded/, the development of which is described by Hamlet and Lettenmaier (2005):

Ref: Hamlet A.F.,Lettenmaier D.P., 2005: Production of temporally consistent gridded precipitation and temperature fields for the continental U.S., 2005: J. Hydrometeorology 6 (3), 330-336.

Data Description: The links below are to files containing daily precipitation (mm/day), maximum and minimum temperature (C), and wind speed (m/s) for each 1/8-degree grid cell, grouped (using the UNIX tar command) by hydrologic area. The individual data files, (which can be extracted using tar xvf <tar filename>) indicate the location center of the grid cell in the file name: data_<latitude>_<longitude>. Each daily data file contains records of daily total precipitation, maximum temperature, minimum temperature, and average 2-meter wind speed in 2-byte integer format (unsigned, signed, signed, signed, respectively). The daily data are stored with multipliers of 40, 100, 100, 100, respectively, so the archived values need to be divided by these multipliers to obtain the variables (see example program segment). These daily data are in little-endian (PC architecture) format. If you need sub-daily interpolation of temperature, or radiative and humidity forcings as well as those listed above, the current VIC code can be run with the OUTPUT_FORCE flag in user_def.h set to TRUE for the cells of interest, and recompiling the program. (see additional sample instructions for using VIC to generate full forcings). If disaggregation of daily precipitation (other than dividing daily precipitation evenly between the timesteps) is desired, one approach is described here. This is designed to preserve the statistical characteristics of time-of-occurence and duration of daily rainfall based on hourly statistics (in the continental U.S. only).

Data sets are currently available only for the western U.S. portion of the domain. Data for other areas of the domain will be added as they are completed.

Summary of 15 Delineated Basins:

Questions? Contact UW Hydro Administrator