GPCC Precipitation Analysis Monthly Version 2025 (at 0.25°, 0.5°, 1.0°, 2.5°)

The GPCC Precipitation Analysis Monthly (GPCC Monthly) provides gridded monthly precipitation totals for the Earth’s land surface. These are calculated from the data provided by the national hydrological and/or meteorological services (NHMS) from more than 190 countries, global and regional data collections, research projects and data distributed in near-real time between the NHMSs.
Monthly precipitation totals are provided on a regular grid with spatial resolutions of 0.25°, 0.5°, 1° and 2.5°. To generate the grids, monthly anomalies were interpolated and superimposed to the gridded long-term means from the GPCC Climatology (LINK).
Grids cover the period from 1891 until present, while the data set is continuously extended by the latest month with a latency of two months. It merges the former Full Data Monthly (LINK) with the Monitoring Product (LINK). This near-real time extension uses quality-controlled SYNOP and CLIMAT data, as it was done in the Monitoring Product. Additionally, data retrieved from NHMSs’ APIs and open data portals are used.
In addition to monthly precipitation totals, also the fraction of liquid and solid precipitation as well as a weather depended under-catch correction factor are provided for all months since 1982. As information on the reliability of the gridded data, the number of stations per grid cell, the number of stations used to calculate the grid cell value and the mean distance of those stations are provided. Furthermore, the standard deviation according to Yamamoto is also available.
A note on the use of time periods with low station density, which is the case especially in the very early years. The low station density results in an effective grid resolution, that is very coarse and where precipitation is often extended into ungauged desert regions. You could handle this by applying an additional field with climatological infilling to replace the interpolated grid cell value for those grid cells, where in the vicinity of 5° was no gauge (use the variable precip_infill).
It is foreseen to update the GPCC Precipitation Analysis Monthly with a cycle of three to four years. The updated version will include non-real time data from the NHMS, that was provided in the meantime.