NCEP/NCAR Global Reanalysis dataset 1948-1999

The dataset at NoSerC's archive comprise 6 hourly time series of TMP, HGT, RH, UGRD, VGRD on 1000, 925, 850, 700, 500, 300, 200 and 100 hPa pressure levels, TMP at the surface level and PRMSL data. The data source is the ds090.0 NCEP/NCAR Global Reanalysis dataset (1948-1999).

Details about the NCEP/NCAR Global Reanalysis dataset may be found at http://www.dss.ucar.edu/pub/reanalysis/index.html.

The table below gives an overview of the data (an X means that one file for each of the years 1948-1999 is available):
 

Variable	Description	Surface/MSL	Pressure levels								File name*
			1000	925	850	700	500	300	200	100
TMP	Temperature [K]	X (Surface)	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	TMPprs.PPP.YY TMPsfc.YY
HGT	Geopotential height [gpm]		X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	HGTprs.PPP.YY
RH	Relative humidity [percent]		X	X	X	X	X	X			RHprs.PPP.YY
UGRD	U wind [m/s]		X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	UGRDprs.PPP.YY
VGRD	V wind [m/s]		X	X	X	X	X	X	X	X	VGRDprs.PPP.YY
PRMSL	Pressure reduced to MSL [Pa]	X (MSL)									PRMSLmls.YY

^* PPP = pressure level, YY = 2 digit year.

The dataset is found at the following directory on gridur: /noserc2/extdata/ncep_reanalysis. This directory contains one subdirectory for each year. All users belonging to the noserc group have read access to the files.

All data files are in GRIB format. A GRIB decoder (wgrib) is available from http://dss.ucar.edu/libraries/grib/wgrib/.

Idar Barstad, presently at Geophysical Institute (Idar.Barstad@gfi.uib.no) , has made the data for the period 1958-1998 available. The other data is made available through RegClim (Knut.Iden@met.no). Barstad may be contacted regarding the data.

The NCEP/NCAR Reanalysis data is also available as monthly mean values from NOAA-CIRES: (http://www.cdc.noaa.gov/cdc/data.ncep.reanalysis.derived.html)