Development of hourly precipitation datasets for national meteorological stations in China

An hourly precipitation database has been developed by collecting and assembling various historical data from national meteorological stations in China. Quality assessment indicates that the vast majority of stations have a data availability rate of 90% or higher, while stations in China's eastern coastal areas and Guizhou, Hunan and other provinces have a low rate of data. The rate of data correctness at all stations is generally high; those with correctness rate lower than 98% accounts for 0.7%, and those with correctness rate of 99% to 98% accounts for 1.8%. The remaining 97.5% of the stations have correctness rate higher than 99%. Comparing the daily precipitations calculated from hourly values and that manually measured, there are 92.1% of stations with difference less than 1 mm, 16.37% of stations with the difference of 0.5 – 5mm, and only 0.9% of stations with the difference greater than 5 mm.