New products of the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre

Since 1989, the Global Precipitation Climatology Centre (GPCC) provides several globally gridded precipitation analyses based on in situ rain gauge measurements. The underlying precipitation database is mainly made up of contributions from the national meteorological and hydrological services of around 190 countries worldwide, but also from data collections of international projects. The database expands continuously, regarding the number of stations and length of timeseries. All incoming data (metadata and observations) undergo a semi-automatic quality control to ensure a high quality of GPCC’s data sets.

The GPCC provides data sets that cover very long time periods of 40 up to 130 years (‘Full Data Daily’, ‘Full Data Monthly’, ‘Climatology’, ‘HOMPRA-Europe’), as well as near-real time analyses ('First Guess Monthly', 'First Guess Daily', 'Monitoring Product', ‘Provisional Daily Precipitation Analysis’ and 'GPCC Drought Index'). In 2024, GPCC released the second version of HOMPRA Europe (Homogenized Precipitation Analysis for Europe Version 2), presenting a unique homogenized data set based on thousands of stations from 1951 to 2015 for Europe. In 2025, the GPCC will release updates of two particularly valuable data sets: Climatology (1951-2020) and Full Data Monthly (1891-2024) & Daily (1982-2024). These data sets are based on the complete database of the GPCC (up to 126’000 stations) and all data undergo an extensive quality control. In addition, some major changes to improve the quality of the data sets are planned, like assessing the interpolation scheme and merging the Full Data Monthly with the Monitoring Product.

All gridded data sets presented 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 data sets, as well as a detailed description and further references for each data set.