The international surface pressure databank version 4

Chesley McColl(1,2), Xungang Yin(3), Gilbert Compo(1,2), Rob Allan(4,7), Russ Vose(5), Scott Woodruff(2), Ken R. Knapp(5), Thomas Cram(6), Jeff Whitaker(2), Philip Brohan(7)

Abstract
The International Surface Pressure Databank (ISPD) represents the world’s largest collection of sub-daily surface and sea level pressure observations from land and marine platforms. The ISPD has been developed as a cooperative effort between the international Atmospheric Circulation Reconstructions over the Earth (ACRE) initiative and working groups of Global Climate Observing System (GCOS) and the World Climate Research Program. It merges more than 65 national and international collections containing pressure observations with the first measurement in 1662, and regular observations spanning from 1750-2014. The Databank has been constructed to facilitate the study of both the variations and gradients in surface air pressure which characterize the thermal and dynamic structures of the atmosphere that impact daily life and also to help in studying the variability of the sea level of the world’s oceans. The data are stored in hourly files, in HDF5 format, which is a very flexible data model that can represent complex data objects and a wide variety of metadata.