GHCN v3 in SQL

The Global Historical Climatology Network-Monthly (GHCN-M) dataset by NCDC is particularly important data set if your research deals with climate data. It is widely accepted. Its major advantage is quality control and a variety of data sources combined together. I used it several times as reference data for validation of calculated climate surfaces. It is also great for uncertainty assessment of climate interpolation methods.

But it is distributed as text files of specific format only. And you will have to write a parser to fetch the data.

This week I decided to load the GHCNv3 into MySQL to make it flexible for fetching. I can fetch different subsets of the data into CSV files just with composing a proper select query. That made a significant speed up in experiments with interpolation techniques.

I share these SQL scripts to enable others researchers to load GHCN v3 into their own SQL servers. You can restore GHCN at your server and perform requests to it. Just download the script, execute it. And you are able to get the data you need. Fast :)

The scripts do not contain CREATE DATABASE statements. Thus create an empty database by hand and then execute the proper script.