WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Rainf GPCC (Rainfall GPCC) 1901-2001
(Rainf WFD GPCC)
(Rainfall WFD GPCC)

The WATCH forcing data (WFD) is a twentieth century meteorological forcing dataset for land surface and hydrological models. It consists of three/six-hourly states of the weather for global half-degree land grid points.

It was generated as part of the EU FP 6 project "WATCH" (WATer and global CHange") which ran from 2007-2011. The data was generated in 2 tranches with slightly different methodology: 1901-1957 and 1958-2001, but generally the dataset can be considered as continuous. More details regarding the generation process can be found in the associated WATCH technical report and paper in J. Hydrometeorology. To understand how the data grid is formed it is necessary to read the attached WFD-land-long-lat-z files either in NetCDF or dat formats. The data covers land points only and excludes the Antarctica. Rainf or rainfall rate is the rainfall rate based on the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) bias corrected, undercatch corrected measured in kg/m2/s at 3 hourly resolution averaged over the next 3 hours and at 0.5 x 0.5 degrees spatial resolution. Please note that there is also a WFD Rainf CRU bias corrected dataset, but as the GPCC dataset is the preferred dataset only this rainfall dataset is available from the EIDC. These rainfall datasets contain rainfall data only and need to be combined with the respective WFD snowfall datasets to obtain precipitation data.