October 2012
Beta Release of the Global Land Surface Databank
NOAA’s National Centers for Environmental Information and NC State University’s Cooperative Institute for Climate and Satellites – North Carolina announce the beta release of the Global Land Surface Databank. As part of a continuing focus on enhancing the observed climate record, NCEI, CICS-NC and international partners launched the International Surface Temperature Initiative (ISTI) in 2010 to improve understanding of the Earth’s climate from the global to local scale, bringing together many international scientists from many scientific specialties.
The ISTI, through its Databank Working Group has released a beta version of an innovative data holding that brings together new and existing sources of surface air temperature. This data holding provides users a way to better track the origin of the data from its collection through its integration into a merged data holding. By providing the data in various stages that lead to the integrated product, by including data origin tracking flags with information on each observation, and by providing the software used to process all observations, the processes involved in creating the observed fundamental climate record are more open and transparent. This beta release contains more than 39,000 stations, greatly enhancing spatial coverage from the 1800s to the present.
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