Validating the University of Delaware’s precipitation and temperature database for northern South America

Vast sections of the planet face either a dearth of ground-based weather stations or are hampered by the poor quality of those in service. In response, researchers are forced to turn to climate field databases, as they constitute a source of reliable information for local studies. Insofar as the Amazon region, these databases prove to be valuable given their open-access platform and the fact that this expansive region possesses few quality stations (coupled with insufficient temporal coverage). However, before basing research on such archives, this information should be compared against in situ station measurements. Then, the present study assesses the validity of temperature and precipitation information furnished by University of Delaware’s database (UD-ATP) by means of a comparison with the open-access information available from Climate Explorer project (CLIMEXP). Results show that UD-ATP database offers better precipitation data representation, especially on Brazil, which is perhaps the effect of higher-quality and larger-quantity observed data.