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.

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.
https://doi.org/10.1175/2011JHM1369.1