By next week [it takes that long to run] I will have daily maps of global barometric pressure, relative humidity, and rainfall too.

"daily global temperature maps from 1973 to 2014"

That is really impressive!

shortly: temperature + " relative humidity, and rainfall" = amphibians

it could be of interest to see if there can be found o correlation between those global data and the global decline of the above mentioned vertebrates (that are - usually - particularely sensitive to temperature, humidity and rainfall...)

The GSOD data goes back to 1929 but is really sparse before 1973. There are other databases that go back much further, but there aren't any others that are global in extent. Forty years isn't very long, but there does appear to be an upward trend in the number of record highs and a downward trend in the number of record lows over this period, as shown in the plot below. It may be revealing to see these trends plotted with trends in biota and productivity. NASA has some plots of photosynthetic productivity that are very interesting. These will make you really worry about what all is being dumped in the oceans, which is where most of the action is.

http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/Global%20Warming/global_record_temperatures.gif

Great news. I would love to have this data. I am working in Kuwait. I guess this can be an excellent information and can be a significant paper to relate these daily av. temperature to precipitation I can do some work to get you vegetative index and probably SAVI relate these to changing temperature pattern. Anothet idea is I have some PM and aerosol data, its variability and temp. pattern will make a nice story.

Hi Dudley,

I would highly appreciate such a collection of data; they would be of great interest not only for our research but for my classes at the University as well.

[email protected]

Hj Dude!

I am working on the impact of CC on Wetland. I could be glad if u can forward  my country

Hi

I am working on GCC and GW, Is it possible to provide numeric data for different regions across the years?

Regards

I am encouraged by the response! I have put a link to the Excel spreadsheets containing the summary temperature data and the list of stations below. The NCDC stores all the data from each station in separate .gz files (about 11,000) and then together in a .tar file for each year. I have written a program that can read the data directly out of the tar files so I don't have decompress and manage thousands of files. It would be easy to extract all of the data for a particular region or group of stations. If you will either select the stations from ish-history.xls and send them to me or define a polygon of latitude and longitude points I will extract the data.

http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/Global%20Warming/tempmap.xls

http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/Global%20Warming/ish-history.xls

Dudley Great Job. This dataset can be really useful for so many of us. I thank you for this mamoth task.

it looks great! Could you please provide metadata with the data?

The meta data (i.e., station names, locations, elevations, dates, etc.)  are included in the Excel spreadsheet, ish-history.xls, which I adapted from the file they maintain, ish-history.txt. Last night I added polygons for the continents and major islands as well as an inside polygon test macro. The raw data is at ftp://ftp.ncdc.noaa.gov/pub/data/gsod along with additional information. Each year is in a .tar file. Recent years are about 100MB each.

I just put an Excel spreadsheet with a graph of the global data coverage out on my ftp server. There is a circle where each station is located and the size of each circle is proportional to the number of years of available data. Of course, there's lots of data in the 10-40 window, where most of the population is, but it's really sparse in the interior of Brazil, Central Africa, and Northern Africa where the population is sparse.

http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/Global%20Warming/coverage.xls

@Dudley:  This sounds quite useful.  Have you considered offering it to Hans Rosling of Gapminder.org?  It would be especially helpful if anyone with curiosity about what is really going on could get a nice visual display that's easy to interpret; Rosling has done a pretty good job with other "big data"! 

I've seen a very interesting video he did presenting population data. He's quite creative. I have developed some rather unusual ways of presenting multi-dimensional data as well, for instance, colored spheres of differing sizes in a three-dimensional box to display four and five-dimensional data. It's one of the many built-in demos in my plotting tool, TP2, which recognizes 27 different types of data formats. TP2 will also display what are called "banana" plots, which reveal hidden relationships between variables. TP2 does a lot of other things too, including: multi-dimensional interpolation, transformation and cropping of finite elements, extrusions, and extracting contours and surfaces, much like TECPLOT, but a lot more versatile and free! TP2 comes in 32-bit and 64-bit native Windows executable versions and will run on any version of Windows, including: 95, 98, NT, 2K, XP, Vista, W7, and W8. Any service pack and, of course, .NET not required. Here's a link:

http://dudleybenton.altervista.org/software/index.html

@Dudley: sounds pretty cool, but I see it's all Windoze-only.  I don't do Windows.  And from your comments on the site I gather you are also not enamoured with M$.  So why not get yourself Free and Open Source?  It's easy!  You can even dual-boot and keep your current system around as a reminder of your years as a M$ slave....  ;-)

It all started with a discussion about Global Warming and a few papers some colleagues and I had published. I was very skeptical then of anthropogenic global climate change and still am to some extent. The discussion became rather heated when I refused to consider anything but actual measured temperature data. Things like ice cores and tree rings involve so many untestable--let alone unverifiable--assumptions as to be almost worthless in my opinion. After all, we humans are pretty insignificant compared to the Earth. Remember, you can't see the Great Wall of China from space and there is no floating island of trash the size of Texas in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. These are urban legends. See the links below for verification. Twenty-five years later and I still refuse to consider anything but real data.

http://www.snopes.com/science/greatwall.asp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Pacific_garbage_patch

http://www.universetoday.com/25364/can-you-see-the-great-wall-of-china-from-space/

Hi, Dudley, you have done an excellent work. I think it would be very useful for exhibiting the temporal evolution and dynamics of the weather and climate over the globe. Have you also created the maps of monthly mean temperature, and of monthly mean temperature anomalies?