Updated gridded datasets version 2020 provided by the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC)

Since its founding in 1989, the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) has been producing global precipitation analyses based on land surface in-situ measurements. In the now over 30 years the underlying database has been continuously expanded and includes a high station density and large temporal coverage. Due to the semi-automatic quality control routinely performed on the incoming station data, the GPCC database has a very high quality. Today, the GPCC holds data from 123,000 stations, about three quarters of them having long time series.

The core of the analyses is formed by data from the global meteorological and hydrological services, which provided their records to the GPCC, as well as global and regional data collections.  In addition, the GPCC receives SYNOP and CLIMAT reports via the WMO-GTS. These form a supplement for the high quality precipitation analyses and the basis for the near real-time evaluations.

Quality control activities include cross-referencing stations from different sources, flagging of data errors, and correcting temporally or spatially offset data. This data then forms the basis for the following interpolation and product generation.

In near real time, the 'First Guess Monthly', 'First Guess Daily', 'Monitoring Product', ‘Provisional Daily Precipitation Analysis’ and the 'GPCC Drought Index' are generated. These are based on WMO-GTS data and monthly data generated by the CPC (NOAA).

With a 2-3 year update cycle, the high quality data products are generated with intensive quality control and built on the entire GPCC data base. These non-real time products consist of the 'Full Data Monthly', 'Full Data Daily', 'Climatology', and 'HOMPRA-Europe' and are now available in the 2020 version.

All gridded datasets presented in this paper are freely available in netcdf format on the GPCC website https://gpcc.dwd.de and referenced by a digital object identifier (DOI). The site also provides an overview of all datasets, as well as a detailed description and further references for each dataset.