Climate Extremes
How hot the hottest day got. How cold the coldest night. How many days crossed 25 °C, how
much rain fell in the wettest five-day stretch, how long the dry spell ran. These are the
ETCCDI climate-extreme indices — 26 of them — and TerraPulse holds them for one weather
station in one calendar year at a time, in the climate_extremes YearLocationdex.
Every index is computed from measured daily observations. Nothing here is a projection, a model run, or a smoothed estimate. Where a station did not report, the cell is empty and says so.
The dex
| Dex | Holds | Cells |
|---|---|---|
climate_extremes | One GHCN station in one year: 26 ETCCDI indices, with monthly detail for 11 of them | 3,345,128 |
A cell exists when at least one of its 26 indices has a real value. A station-year where everything is missing is not a row — it would only inflate the grid without carrying anything.
What the indices measure
The 26 fall into four groups, all of them counted or measured, none inferred:
- Temperature extremes — the hottest day and coldest night of the year and of each month (TXx, TNx, TXn, TNn), and the daily temperature range (DTR).
- Threshold counts — frost days, summer days, icing days, tropical nights, and the growing-season length (FD, SU, ID, TR, GSL).
- Precipitation — the wettest day and wettest five-day stretch (Rx1day, Rx5day), total wet-day precipitation, intensity, heavy-rain day counts, and the longest dry and wet spells (PRCPTOT, SDII, R10mm, R20mm, CDD, CWD, R95p, R99p).
- Percentile indices — cool and warm days and nights against a 1961–1990 base, and warm and cold spell durations (TX10p, TX90p, TN10p, TN90p, WSDI, CSDI).
Coverage is not uniform, and the dex does not pretend otherwise. Precipitation extremes cover 123,208 stations; the temperature extremes about 39,000; the percentile indices only 6,867–6,929, because they need a usable 1961–1990 baseline that most stations do not have.
Provenance
Every cell traces to NOAA NCEI's GHCNDEX-STN station-level index bundle (version beta-20260805), computed from GHCN-Daily 3.34. Station identity — position, elevation, name, WMO id — comes from the inventory shipped in the same bundle, joined on the 11-character GHCN-Daily station id. No network geocoding, no imputation, no unit conversion: temperatures are °C and precipitation mm exactly as published.
The source's missing-value sentinel is carried through as an explicit null rather than a number. The partial current year is kept as published — 2026 cells carry the months that exist and a null annual value.