Six- and three-hourly meteorological observations from 223 USSR stations

This document describes a database containing 6- and 3-hourly meteorological observations from a 223-station network of the former Soviet Union. These data have been made available through cooperation between the two principal climate data centers of the United States and Russia: the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), in Asheville, North Carolina, and the All-Russian Research Institute of Hydrometeorological Information -- World Data Centre (RIHMI-WDC) in Obninsk. Station records consist of 6- and 3-hourly observations of some 24 meteorological variables including temperature, weather type, precipitation amount, cloud amount and type, sea level pressure, relative humidity, and wind direction and speed. The 6-hourly observations extend from 1936 to 1965; the 3-hourly observations extend from 1966 through the mid-1980s (1983, 1984, 1985, or 1986; depending on the station). These data have undergone extensive quality assurance checks by RIHMI-WDC, NCDC, and the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC). The database represents a wealth of meteorological information for a large and climatologically important portion of the earth`s land area, and should prove extremely useful for a wide variety of regional climate change studies. These data are available free of charge as a numeric data package (NDP) from CDIAC. The NDP consists of this document and 40 data files that are available via the Internet or on 8mm tape. The total size of the database is {approximately}2.6 gigabytes.