WATer and global CHange (WATCH) Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century
(WFD)
The WATCH Forcing data 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 two 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.
This data collection contains these resources
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WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Rainf GPCC (Rainfall GPCC) 1901-2001
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WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Snowf GPCC (Snowfall GPCC) 1901-2001
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WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Tair (air temperature) 1901-2001
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WATCH Forcing Data (WFD) - 20th Century Wind (near surface wind speed) 1901-2001
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WATCH forcing data (WFD) - 20th Century LWdown (surface incident longwave radiation) 1901-2001
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WATCH forcing data (WFD) - 20th century PSurf (surface pressure) 1901-2001
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WATCH forcing data (WFD) - 20th century Qair (specific humidity) 1901-2001
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WATCH forcing data (WFD) - 20th century SWdown (surface incident shortwave radiation) 1901-2001
Supplemental information
Weedon, G.P., Gomes, S., Viterbo, P., Shuttleworth, W.J., Blyth, E., Österle, H. , Adam, J.C., Bellouin, N., Boucher, O. & Best, M. (2011). Creation of the WATCH Forcing Data and Its Use to Assess Global and Regional Reference Crop Evaporation over Land during the Twentieth Century. Journal of Hydrometeorology: Vol 12, No 5.