The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD) is the world's largest collection of pressure observations. It has been developed by extracting observations from established international archives of meteorological variables and by combining these with observations made available through additional international cooperation with data recovery facilitated by the Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) Initiative and the other contributing organizations. The ISPD is assembled under the auspices of the GCOS Working Group on Surface Pressure and the GCOS/WCRP Working Group on Observational Data Sets for Reanalysis by NOAA Earth System Research Laboratory (ESRL), NOAA's National Climatic Data Center (NCDC), and the Climate Diagnostics Center (CDC) of the University of Colorado's Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES).  

The ISPD consists of three components: station observations, marine observations, and tropical cyclone best track pressure reports.

The station component is a blend of many national and international collections, with the largest contributor being surface and sea level pressure observations from the International Surface Database (ISD, Lott et al., 2008). Procedures for blending the station component are described at Yin et al. (2008).

The marine component consists of the available version of the International Comprehensive Ocean Atmosphere Data Set (ICOADS, Worley et al., 2005). In some ISPD versions, ICOADS Auxiliary data are also used.

The tropical cyclone component comes from the available version of the International Best Track Archive for Climate Stewardship (IBTrACS, Knapp et al., 2010). In the absence of a central pressure estimate, IBTrACS wind estimates are converted to pressure using an empirical gradient wind equation (Compo et al. 2011).

Version 4 (1755-2011)

Version 4 of the International Surface Pressure Databank is currently being assembled. For station observations, please submit  your observations to NOAA's National Climatic Data Center Xungang.Yin@noaa.gov using the ASCII exchange format v1.0 by 15 October 2012. Submission after this date may go into version 5 but will be incorporated.

Additional guidelines for station data submission are under development.

Version 3 (1755-2010)

Version 3 of the International Surface Pressure Databank is currently being merged. NOAA's National Climatic Data Center has recently merged the station component using the ASCII exchange format v1.0.  The marine component will come from ICOADS version 2.5. The tropical cyclone component will come from IBTrACS V03r03.

Maps showing the location of stations in a selected year can be browsed at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/ISPD/.
The V3 list of stations, including location and period of coverage, and their history is a text file that can be imported into Excel or read into other programs using this format.

Version 2 (1768-2010)

Version 2 of the ISPD can be obtained courtesy of Data Support Section of the Computational and Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research from http://rda.ucar.edu/datasets/ds132.0/. Subsetting tools are available to retrieve the data in ASCII or HDF5. NCAR also has documentation on the HDF5 Format for International Surface Pressure Data Bank v10.11.

For the period 1871-2010, Version 2 includes metadata information from the quality control system of the 20th Century Reanalysis Project. These so-called "feedback" records include the difference between the final analysis and each observation, the estimated uncertainty in the observation, and other quality information.

See Compo et al. (2011) for a more detailed description. 

Maps showing the location of stations in a selected year can be browsed at http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/data/ISPD/v2.0/.
The V2 list of stations, including location and period of coverage, and their history is a text file that can be imported into Excel or read into other programs using this format.

DOI:10.5065/D6SQ8XDW

Citation: Compo, G. P., et al. 2010. International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPDv2) 1768 to 2010. Research Data Archive at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, Computational and Information Systems Laboratory. http://dx.doi.org/10.5065/D6SQ8XDW. Accessed^§ dd mmm yyyy.
  ^§Please fill in the "Accessed" date with the day, month, and year (e.g. - 5 Aug 2011) you last accessed the data from the NCAR Research Data Archive.

      Future Additions

         At http://badc.nerc.ac.uk/browse/badc/corral/images/metobs there any many useful links to information about known observations and their recovery status. The site has links to scanned images of hard copy meteorological observations held by the National Meteorological Archive of the UK Met Office that have been imaged to date. It also has an EXCEL file containing the status of all of the historical weather data (whether hard copy, scanned or digitised) being recovered, imaged, and digitised by the international ACRE community and international organisations projects and researchers linked to the Initiative for the ISPD. Additionally, the site has annual global maps showing terrestrial weather data distribution and their status.

Guidelines for station data submission

Data Access

The International Surface Pressure Databank would like to thank the contributing organizations and make many grateful acknowledgments.

The 20th Century Reanalysis Project used resources of the National Energy Research Scientific Computing Center and of the Oak Ridge Leadership Computing Facility at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, which are supported by the Office of Science of the U.S. Department of Energy under Contract No. DE-AC02-05CH11231 and Contract No. DE-AC05-00OR22725, respectively. Support for the 20th Century Reanalysis Project dataset is provided by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science Innovative and Novel Computational Impact on Theory and Experiment (DOE INCITE) program, and Office of Biological and Environmental Research (BER), and by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Climate Program Office.

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