GHCNh station inventory

Sources & data notes

Source: NOAA NCEI GHCNh (Global Historical Climatology Network hourly) station list, ghcnh-station-list.txt, supplied directly rather than downloaded by this script, retrieved 13 September 2026. Column positions and network-code meanings are taken from NOAA's ghcnh_DOCUMENTATION.pdf, Version 1.1.0 (10 March 2026), Section II. Basemap tiles are fetched live from OpenStreetMap and Esri; choose No basemap if you are offline. Three places where this file disagrees with its own documentation. First, Section II implies a 90-character record with an ICAO field at columns 87-90; every line in the shipped file is exactly 88 characters. Second, columns 87-88 hold an ISO 3166 country code, not ICAO. All 238 distinct values are two-letter country codes; they differ from the FIPS code embedded in the station ID on 18,285 of 38,870 records, in exactly the way FIPS and ISO differ (Antigua is FIPS "AC" but ISO "AG"; Algeria is FIPS "AG" but ISO "DZ"); and genuine ICAO identifiers appear inside the station IDs instead (AEI0000OMAA is Abu Dhabi Intl, ICAO OMAA). This map reads that column as country. Third, network code "P" appears on 332 records but is not among the eight values Section II lists. All are US stations with IDs of the form USP000NNN-N. The GHCN-Daily readme documents "P" as "Pre-Coop", an internal NCEI identifier for records predating the U.S. Weather Bureau, which fits the ID pattern, but GHCNh's own documentation does not say so. The documented GSN and HCN/CRN flag fields exist in the layout but are empty for all 38,870 records in this file. The STATE field is not reliable outside the United States. Section II calls it the U.S. postal code for U.S. stations only, but also points to ghcn-states.txt for state/province/territory codes, and the file uses it both ways. 191 non-US records carry a value: 55 are self-consistent (state equals country) and 4 are valid Canadian provinces, but 132 are inconsistent - 16 Puerto Rico stations are tagged with mainland US states (SAN JUAN as AK, MAYAGUEZ as TX, MONA ISLAND as NY), 15 Antarctic stations carry AS or VI, Greenland carries NL, Barbuda carries TX. These are shown as published, not corrected. Two records are excluded for carrying a transposed latitude/longitude in the source file itself (latitude above 90°): RUU71-00102 (Chabarowka) and RUU71-00113 (Irkutsk). The correct coordinate is not recoverable from this file alone. Elevation is blank where the source carried a sentinel: the documented −999.9, plus −999.0, 9999.0 and 8191.0, which the documentation does not mention. Total affected among plotted stations: 1,554. This station list carries no period-of-record field. Unlike the ISD and upper-air maps on this site, there is no way to filter by when a station's record begins or ends from this file; presence in the inventory says nothing about current reporting status. Presence in this inventory does not mean a station reports hourly wind and sky condition. Confirm the variables and period of record in the station's own data file before using it in AERMET.