One of my colleagues and I have been working on adaptation strategies of farmers to various climate extremes at two coastal districts of Odisha a state in India which is hit by various climate extremes every year.
We have completed our survey regarding the same however we don’t have meteorological data for the past 15 years (1995-2010). We need this to compare the perception of local people and the real trend.
Hence can anyone suggest me how to obtain the same from various freely accessible sources (i.e. satellite data or any other sources). As this is a part of our freelance research and we do not have any funding; We are not in a position to pay.
Thanks.
Question
Freely Accessible Sources of Meteorological Data (Rainfall, Temperature, Humidity)?
All Answers (40)
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I'm not sure if you can find the information you want here: http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/. But it sure has lots of data. Good luck! -
A common observational data used widely in climate research community is CRU data, which span quite a long period from 1901-2009. The data can be downloaded from http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/ -
Metereological data may be obtained from website of Indiawaterportal. -
Dear Parthasarathi,
You can access a wide verity of meteorological data from the links listed in https://sites.google.com/site/geometocea/home/online-links/online-data-links as well as many more sources. The selection of dataset depend up on your objectives. From your post, It seems that you wand to do some trend analysis. For doing climate trend analysis 15 year data is not sufficient, because whatever trend you may get from it may contain decadal and multidecadal climate variabilities like Solar Cycle, North Atlantic Oscillation, Pacific Decadal Oscillation etc. You can use reanalysis data available from NOAA (NCEP/NCAR) or ECMWF (ERA). If you are perticulerly interested in precipitation GPCP and CMAP are global gridded precipitation data. But since you are particularly interested in some districts in Orissa local data set are better than global data. You can consult India Meteorological Department (IMD) to get some station data. -
Dear Dr. George, Thanks for your suggestions.
However as suggested by you I have discussed with India Meteorological Department (IMD) but they are asking for money to give the data and as hinted earlier I am not in a position to pay. Hence, i wanted to use the satellite data if available freely just to compare between the local perception and actual climate trend.
Hence, please suggest what can be done in such a case? -
Thank you all for your quick response, I would certainly check the sites today itself as suggested by you all and let you know wheteher your suggestions contributed or not.
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Tropical Rainfall Measuring Mission (TRMM) satellite provide precipitation data. You can also use GPCP or CMAP precipitation data which are freely available. See the above mentioned link.
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Dear Mahapatra.
One possibility would be usind= satellite imagery (like TM - -Landsat 5) to see what is hapening with albedo, land sutface temperature and vegetation indexes.
Such images are free and you may use free software for manage with TM images.
Best regards.
Bernardo Silva -
Dear Mahapatra
The meteorological satellite data (MTSAT) is freely download from Kochi University, Weather Home. You may download from here: http://weather.is.kochi-u.ac.jp/
Best regards,
Assist Prof. Teerawong Laosuwan -
Check the data library of the International Research Institute for Climate and Society. they have lots of freely available data. http://iridl.ldeo.columbia.edu/index.html . Also check the USGS site -
You canscan this site:
http://www.earthsystemgrid.org/home.htm;jsessionid=79AABD9F5D0791BBA7008E91C8A969BF -
some of the data you can also get from Meteorological and Oceanographic Satellite Data Archival Centre (MOSDAC) .
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Thank you all once again for the responses.
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You may also use the AVHRR vegetation data record, which begins in 1981. I agree with the comment above- 15 years is not enough time to determine a trend. You may send me an email and I will send you the GIMMS AVHRR vegetation data from 1981-2008. These data will allow an integrated assessment of both temperature and precipitation's impact on vegetation productivity, which may be closer to local community's perceptions.
I also wanted to say that our experience with FEWS NET is that local perceptions are not very accurate beyond 5 years. Thus what we do is have two anomalies - the 'short term mean' of five years, and the 'long term mean' which uses all data available (for MODIS vegetation data 12 years, for AVHRR 28). You can see anomalies for these datasets for vegetation data for Africa at: http://www.pecad.fas.usda.gov/cropexplorer/fews_briefing/ -
You might like to look at this data set:
URL (e.g. for easy checking of directory structure, update dates and file sizes):
ftp://rfdata:forceDATA@ftp.iiasa.ac.at and click on /WATCH_Forcing_Data and /WFDEI
ftp downloads of individual files:
ftp.iiasa.ac.at, un=rfdata, pw=forceDATA then: “cwd /WFDEI”.
Here we put together 3 hourly meteorological data fro the entire global land area on a 0.5 degree grid. The data is based on monthly CRU data dissagregated to daily and 3 hourly using ECMWF reanalysis. The WFGEI is for 1979 to 2009. The methodology is described in:
Weedon, G. P., and Coauthors, 2011: Creation of the WATCH Forcing Data and its use to assess global and regional reference crop evaporation over land during the twentieth century. J. Hydrometeor., 12, 823–848. -
Depending on what you are looking for, you might find the WORLDCLIM data useful.
http://www.worldclim.org/
High resolution, easily digestible formats, and a range of monthly climatic variables as well a bioclimatic variables.
Overall, a very useful dataset, if the limitations of interpolation are not too much of a stumbling block for your work. -
you can use of TRMM satellite data that is free in internet. its better you use from local meteorology stations such as synoptic stations. -
you go to visit metrological dept for back data its not available on Internet so dont waste time... -
It is not correct. Meteorological data of India districtwise is available at http://www.indiawaterportal.org/.
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www.worldclim.org which has the spatial resolution of 1 sq km. This is finest meteorological data for last 50 years.
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I don't think the spatial resolution of worldclim has nothing to do with quality at these spatial resolutions, 1km. ...
I recommend the following.
Visit first climate explorer : There you have everything you may need. http://climexp.knmi.nl/start.cgi?id=someone@somewhere
Second, if you are a little confused about the amount of data available at climate explorer, and want really good data, for climate, directly to cru.
say, with different resolutions too.
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/
Finally, if you want something different, quality tested by a short group of persons, data loved and shared, visit the guys from university of delaware ... Willmott and Matsuura. These guys are hydrologist and they know what they do...
http://climate.geog.udel.edu/~climate/
best regards, and goof work
rodrigo -
Thanks once again for all your kind suggestions. I am working along and hope to prepare a report soon.
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Hi i would think it will be difficult to get reliable data for your region for the past 15 years. Your best option would be to ask your national weather agency such as the Met office in the UK the have online databases with all this data freely available plus some satellite data. If the Indian equivalent to the met office does not allow this I think you may be in trouble because very few agencies are going to have regional weather data outside of India, some Universities might but if there using it for an active research project i doubt they will give it away freely.
If you can not get regional data your only real option is to use global or Continental data which is at much lower resolution and of poorer quality, so you would have to make a number of assumption for your project.
The best source of this sort of data is the IPCC if its not on there website they will provided links to were it can be found. -
Hi,
Just check authenticity of the data on website, http://www.indiawaterportal.org/. -
Hello there
I agree with Rodrigo that the Climate Explorer and CRU are probably the best places to go. There are a few more ideas on a blog post I wrote last year:
https://andyrussell.wordpress.com/2011/01/11/useful-climate-tools-and-data-sites/
Thanks
Andy -
Indian water portal weather data has generated from the gridded datasets - so it has two errors as compared to that of surface weather station data (a) errors due to interpolation when gridding station data and (b) errors in averaging grid data corresponding to district boundary. So use such data at your own risk.
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You can also try this site but the data set is gridded at 0.5 degree. http://www.engr.scu.edu/~emaurer/global_data/ -
You can contact India Meteorological Department, Pune to avail meteorological data or visit www.imd.gov.in. -
Thank you..
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I have a related question on data from weather forecasts on historical conditions.
https://www.researchgate.net/post/Access_to_forecasts_based_on_historical_weather_data#share -
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ghcnm/v2.php
You can check around here! -
For remotely sensed daily precip data, notice NASA TRMM dataset -
Take a look here. This site provides access to daily observations of meteorological variables. This can be quite useful, depending on the actual use: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/res40.pl?page=gsod.html -
htpp://www.wonderground.com for Indian meteorological datas -
i think, if u want the rainfall data of that period, u can contact IMD weather station, Shimala office, Shivaji nagar, pune, maharashtra. u can find out the address or communication mean with the help of internet.. and ask them about the data and the procidure for getting it... -
Can the high resolution CRU datasets be used? -
Sanchita Mondal is correct. Its IMD, Govt. of India, publish "Meteorological Tables" for the country as a whole Meteorological Station wise. State Govt. Departments (Agriculture) also generate such data at further lower levels. Even Directorate of Census Operations Publish such data(secondary one) in their publication- DCHB at State-level, in the concerned state itself every thing would be available. -
Hi Parth, There are a number of good global databases. One of them is from NASA. The website is at: http://disc.sci.gsfc.nasa.gov/giovanni/overview/index.html
In the window, go to meteorological portals. Good luck!
Nathalie
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