This is a dataset of mean monthly surface climate measurements over global land areas, excluding Antarctica, for the period 1961-1990. Values were interpolated from station data to a 0.5 degree latitude/longitude grid for several climatic parameters: precipitation and wet-day frequency, mean temperature and diurnal temperature range (from which maximum temperature and minimum temperature can be determined), vapour pressure, sunshine, cloud cover, ground-frost frequency and windspeed. A description of the data files is provided as a companion file. For a complete documentation of the dataset, see New et al, 1999. Also refer to IPCC Data Distribution Centre.