Chronological Development of Terrestrial Mean Precipitation

AbstractOver 150 years of investigations into global terrestrial precipitation are revisited to reveal how researchers estimated annual means from in situ observations before the age of digitization. After introducing early regional efforts to measure precipitation, the pioneering estimates of terrestrial mean precipitation from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries are compared to successive estimates, including those using the latest gridded precipitation datasets available. The investigation reveals that the range of the early estimates is comparable to the interannual variation in terrestrial mean precipitation derived from the latest Climatic Research Unit (CRU) dataset. In-depth revisions of the estimates were infrequent up to the 1970s, due in part to difficulty obtaining and maintaining up-to-date datasets with global coverage. This point is illustrated in a “family tree” that identifies the key publications that subsequent authors referenced, sometimes decades after the original publi...

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