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HadISD - global sub-daily station dataset

HadISD is a global sub-daily dataset based on the ISD dataset from NOAA's NCEI. As well as station selection criteria, a suite of quality control tests has been run on the major climatological variables. The data span of version 3.4.1.202411p is 1/1/1931 to the end of November 2024 and each station is available individually. The first version of HadISD was 1.0.0.2011f (covering 1973-2011).

Current Version - v3.4.1.202411p (5 December 2024)

As a result of the forthcoming termination of updates to the ISD dataset, HadISD will stop being updated during 2024. For more details, see the HadISD blog

HadISD v1.0.x and v2.0.x have been superceded and are no longer being updated. Previous versions are available at the links below.

A preliminary version of HadISD.3.4.1.202411p is now available here. This new version spans 1/1/1931 to 1/12/2024 and updates version 3.4.0.2023f. There will be at further updates to this dataset at roughly monthly intervals, appending data from 2024 only. The next will be v3.4.1.2024f in January 2025. Until that point, if you see anything untoward in this dataset, do let us know.

A station listing with IDs, names and location information is here (also with names). The data are provided as netCDF files, one file per station. The variables that are quality controlled are: temperature, dewpoint temperature, sea-level pressure, wind speed and direction, cloud data (total, low, mid and high level). Also included in the files are past significant weather and cloud base but these have not been quality controlled and we make no guarantees about their quality and completness. Also available are the quality control flags and the data values which have been removed in the quality control process.

Previous Versions

Other versions of HadISD available through this website are:

For older versions please contact the dataset maintainers.

Some versions are also available at the CEDA Archive (Centres for Environmental Data Analysis): HadISD Dataset Collection at CEDA.

Brief description of the data

Individual stations within the ISD were composited when it was appropriate to do so. Then stations were selected on the basis of their length of record and reporting frequency. These 9678 stations were passed through a suite of automated quality control tests designed to remove bad data while keeping the extremes. None of the ISD flags were used. The QC tests focussed on the temperature, dewpoint temperature and sea-level pressure variables, although some were applied to the wind speed and direction and cloud data. The data files also contain other variables which were pulled through from the raw ISD record, but have had no QC applied. Some final filtering was performed to select those stations which in our opinion are most useful for climate studies. Note: These data have not yet been homogenised and so trend fitting should be undertaken with caution, however homogeneity information is available here

Keep in touch

For more detailed information, follow our HadISD blog. Here we describe bug fixes, routine updates and other exploratory analysis.

Figure shows the distribution of HadISD stations on a 1x1degree grid. These are the subset from the ISD which report at least every 6 hours and have a long enough record. It was created when refreshing the station list for v3.4.1.202401p.

v3.4.1.202411p data are available from the download page without charge under the Non-Commercial Government Licence. Please read the terms and conditions.

References

When using the dataset in a paper, the following are the correct citations to use. Please also state the version number used

Dunn, R. J. H., (2019), HadISD version 3: monthly updates, Hadley Centre Technical Note

Dunn, R. J. H., et al. (2016), Expanding HadISD: quality-controlled, sub-daily station data from 1931, Geoscientific Instrumentation, Methods and Data Systems, 5, 473-491

Dunn, R. J. H., et al. (2014), Pairwise homogeneity assessment of HadISD, Climate of the Past, 10, 1501-1522

Dunn, R. J. H., et al. (2012), HadISD: A Quality Controlled global synoptic report database for selected variables at long-term stations from 1973-2011, Climate of the Past, 8, 1649-1679

Smith, A., et al. (2011): The Integrated Surface Database: Recent Developments and Partnerships. Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, 92, 704-708

Product User Guide

An introduction to the data set is available as a pdf, which includes a "quick start" guide as well as more in depth material including.

Commercial and media enquiries

You can access the Met Office Customer Centre, any time of the day or night by phone, fax or e-mail. Trained staff will help you find the information or products that are right for you.
Contact the Met Office Customer Centre

Quality Control Code

The python code used for the station selection and quality control from Version 2 and Version 3 can be found on Github.
The IDL code used for the quality control and final filtering for version 1 can be found here.
We do not intend to provide in-depth support for this code. We emphasise that the choices we have made in the QC and also the final filtering are one of a number of other equally reasonable choices, and encourage other interested parties to develop their own QC and filtering procedures to allow the structural uncertainties of this sub-daily dataset to be investigated.

Homogeneity Assessment

We have assessed the homogeneity of four of the observed meteorological variables present in HadISD: temperature, dew point temperature, sea-level pressure and wind speed. This has been performed on monthly averages of the sub-daily data, and is fully described in Dunn et al, 2014, Climate of the Past, 10, 1501-1522. The homogeneity assessment results for v3.4.0.2023f are available for download here.

Online Material

A number of summary and diagnostic outputs from the quality control code as well as station lists for a number of selection criteria are available for v3.4.1.202411p here.

We have adapted our versioning system from CRUTEM4, and so the dataset numbering is of the form HadISD.X.Y.Z.1234i, and is outlined in more detail in the paper linked above. X is for a major change and would be accompanied by a peer-reviewed paper. Y is a more minor change, e.g. in one of the QC tests and would be described in a tech-note. Finally Z is a small change, for example addition or changes to data in the past. The last complete year of the dataset is given by 1234, and the final character shows if the dataset is f-final or p-preliminary. Therefore HadISD.1.0.1.2012f would be the final version of the dataset containing data up to the end of 2012, and there have been some changes to past data over HadISD.1.0.0.2011f.

NEW: A number of images and movies created from HadISD to show its capabilities are here.

Dataset produced in collaboration with: