Identification

Title

Gridded Ensemble Precipitation and Temperature Estimates over the Contiguous United States Version 2.0

Alternative title(s)

d010078

Abstract

<p>Gridded precipitation and temperature products are inherently uncertain due to myriad factors, including interpolation from a sparse observation network, measurement representativeness, and measurement errors. Generally uncertainty is not explicitly accounted for in gridded products of precipitation or temperature; if it is represented, it is often included in an ad-hoc manner. A lack of quantitative uncertainty estimates for hydrometeorological forcing fields limits the application of advanced data assimilation systems and other analysis tools in land-surface and hydrologic modeling. This study develops a gridded, observation-based ensemble of precipitation and temperature at a daily increment for the period 1980-2012. This allows for the estimation of precipitation and temperature uncertainty in hydrologic modeling and data assimilation through the use of the ensemble variance. Statistical verification of the ensemble indicates that it has generally good reliability and discrimination of events of various magnitudes, but has a slight wet bias for high threshold events (> 50 mm). The ensemble mean is similar to another widely used hydrometeorological dataset but with some important differences. The ensemble product produces more realistic occurrence of precipitation statistics (wet day fraction), which impacts the empirical derivation of other fields used in land-surface and hydrologic modeling. Elevation lapse rates for temperature are derived directly from the observations, resulting in higher winter temperatures at high elevations in the intermountain western US.</p>

Resource type

dataset

Resource locator

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d010078/

protocol: https

name: Dataset Description

description: Related Link

function: information

https://gdex.ucar.edu/datasets/d010078/dataaccess/

protocol: https

name: Data Access

description: Related Link

function: download

Unique resource identifier

code

codeSpace

Dataset language

Spatial reference system

code identifying the spatial reference system

Classification of spatial data and services

Topic category

climatologyMeteorologyAtmosphere

Keywords

Keyword set

keyword value

dataset

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2021-03-30

Keyword set

keyword value

MODELS > MODELS

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Keyword set

keyword value

EARTH SCIENCE > LAND SURFACE > TOPOGRAPHY > TERRAIN ELEVATION

EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > PRECIPITATION > PRECIPITATION RATE

EARTH SCIENCE > ATMOSPHERE > ATMOSPHERIC TEMPERATURE > SURFACE TEMPERATURE > AIR TEMPERATURE

originating controlled vocabulary

title

reference date

date type

revision

effective date

2025-10-03

Geographic location

West bounding longitude

East bounding longitude

North bounding latitude

South bounding latitude

Temporal reference

Temporal extent

Begin position

1980

End position

2012

Dataset reference date

date type

publication

effective date

2015-01-01

Frequency of update

notPlanned

Quality and validity

Lineage

Conformity

Data format

name of format

version of format

Constraints related to access and use

Constraint set

Use constraints

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License

Limitations on public access

None

Responsible organisations

Responsible party

organisation name

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata on metadata

Metadata point of contact

organisation name

NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

email address

datahelp@ucar.edu

web address

https://gdex.ucar.edu

name: NSF NCAR Geoscience Data Exchange

description: The Geoscience Data Exchange (GDEX), managed by the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory (CISL) at NSF NCAR, contains a large collection of meteorological, atmospheric composition, and oceanographic observations, and operational and reanalysis model outputs, integrated with NSF NCAR High Performance Compute services to support atmospheric and geosciences research.

function: download

responsible party role

pointOfContact

Metadata date

2025-10-09T01:47:30Z

Metadata language