Climate Data Product Development

Creating datasets suitable for long-term climate monitoring from routine weather observations presents many problems because of changes in observing systems and practices over time. To improve our understanding of long-term climate change, we have created climate data records that are quality-controlled, consistently formatted, and, in some cases, adjusted for climate research purposes. We make these datasets available to the public for use by the scientific community. When appropriate, we transfer these datasets to NOAA's National Climate Data Center for operational updating and dissemination.

Datasets available on our website include radiosonde metadata, U.S. surface humidity and temperature data, upper-air water vapor data, tropical tropopause climatology and Angell's seasonal anomalies of upper-air temperature, ozone and the QBO. Datasets found on other sites include:

• Radiosonde Atmospheric Temperature Products for Assessing Climate (RATPAC) developed by Free et al. (2005, Reprint) are regularly updated and available from NOAA's National Climatic Data Center.
• Our tropical tropopause, stratosphere, and tropopause climatological datasets (Seidel et al. 2001, Reprint) are available at the Stratospheric Processes and Their Role in Climate (SPARC) Data Center.
• An update of our U.S. extreme heat dataset (Gaffen and Ross 1998 Reprint, 1999 Reprint) is available from the NOAA National Climatic Data Center.
• An updated version of our radiosonde station history meta-dataset (Gaffen 1993, 1996) is also available from the National Climatic Data Center, as part of the Integrated Global Radiosonde Archive (IGRA)
• Radiosonde and Microwave Sounding Unit satellite upper-air temperature datasets used by Seidel et al. (2004, Reprint) are available via the Journal of Climate's electronic supplement.
  

Each of the available datasets has been used in studies that have been published in peer-reviewed journals. We request that data users reference the relevant articles. Thank you.