HadISD is a station based dataset comprising 6103 stations covering 1973-present. These stations are a subset of the stations available in the Integrated Surface Database (ISD), and are ones selected to be those most useful for climate studies (long records and high reporting frequency). Individual stations within the ISD were composited when it was appropriate to do so to improve the coverage.

HadISD is a multi-variate dataset, where the following fields are available: temperature, dewpoint temperature, sea-level pressure, wind speed, wind direction and cloud data (total, low, mid and high levels). These variables are all quality controlled using an automatic suite of tests, the code for which is available on request. The QC tests were designed to remove bad data whilst keeping true extremes. A number of other variables are also carried through to the final NetCDF files, but have not been quality controlled (e.g. precipitation period, precipitation depth, sunshine duration).