Met Office Hadley Centre observations datasets
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Daily Surface Temperature Benchmarks data download - version 1, October 2014

If download speeds or limits are an issue, or if you require individual stations in ASCII please contact us and we will investigate alternative solutions.


Files are compressed in two forms .tar (use tar -xzf filename to expand) or .zip.

Files are ASCII format identical to that of GHCN-Daily. Each ".dly" file contains data for one station. The name of the file corresponds to a station's identification code. For example, "WY000000030.dly" contains the data for the station with the identification code WY000000030 with the name and location given in the "_stnlist.txt" file.

Each record in a ".dly" file contains one month of daily data. The variables on each line include the following:
------------------------------
Variable   Columns  Type
------------------------------
ID           1-11        Character
YEAR       12-15      Integer
MONTH     16-17      Integer
ELEMENT  18-21      Character
VALUE1    22-26      Integer
SPACE     27-29      Character
VALUE2    30-34      Integer
SPACE     35-37      Character
. . .
. . .
. . .
VALUE31  262-266   Integer
SPACE     267-269   Character
------------------------------
These variables have the following definitions:

... and so on until the 31st day of the month. Note: If the month has less than 31 days, then the remaining variables are set to missing (e.g., for April, VALUE31 = -9999).

Each record in a "_stnlist.txt" file contains the metadata for one stations. The variables on each line include the following:
------------------------------
Variable       Columns   Type
------------------------------
ID               1-11         Character
LATITUDE     13-20       Real
LONGITUDE  22-30       Real
ELEVATION   32-37       Real
------------------------------
These variables have the following definitions: