What data are used for U.S. land surface temperature monitoring?
NOAA maintains a network of thousands of stations, many of which have volunteer observers. A subset of 1,219 of these stations in the contiguous 48 states make up the U.S. Historical Climatology Network (USHCN). This dataset has undergone extensive quality control and corrections to remove biases. One of the differences between USHCN and GHCN is that for U.S. data, we have access to detailed station history information which is used to guide part of the bias removal process. Additionally, the new, high quality U.S. Climate Reference Network data are used to verify recent years of the USHCN analysis.
