Gridded Meteorological Data

University of Washington

Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering

Surface Water Modeling Group
 

Data Set: Daily and monthly 1/8-degree gridded meteorological data for the Colorado River basin (Region 4 in the map below) for the period 1 Jan 1915 - 31 Dec 2006

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 Maurer et al. (2002):

Ref: Maurer, E.P., A.W. Wood, J.C. Adam, D.P. Lettenmaier, and B. Nijssen, 2002, A Long-Term Hydrologically-Based Data Set of Land Surface Fluxes and States for the Conterminous United States, J. Climate 15, 3237-3251.

Data Description: The links below are to files containing daily precipitation (mm/day), maximum and minimum temperature (C), and wind speed (m/s) at 1/8-degree spatial resolution. All files are in netCDF format, to be more compatible with climate model and other meteorological data formats, as well as facilitate use of NCO Utilitiesand CDAT software. Files are named in the format: "variable.timestep.year.nc" where timestep is "daily" or "monthly", and variables are prcp, Tmax, Tmin, Wind . See file headers for details....

The monthly time series (for each year) of the same variables (precipitation is a monthly total in mm, other variables are monthly averages), or check by using the ncdump -h var.timestep.yr.nc command with (-c -h & -v , options). Use the UNIX command tar -zxvf filename.gz.tar to extract..

Questions? Contact UW Hydro Administrator