Quick links : Global 0.5° 1901-2022 : Europe 5° 1750-2003 : Alps 10' 1800-2003
The scPDSI metric was introduced by Wells et al. (2004), who give detailed information about its calculation. The scPDSI is a variant on the original PDSI of Palmer (1965), with the aim to make results from different climate regimes more comparable. As with the PDSI, the scPDSI is calculated from time series of precipitation and temperature, together with fixed parameters related to the soil/surface characteristics at each location.
For Europe (van der Schrier et al., 2006a) and North America (van der Schrier et al., 2006b), we calculated the scPDSI values using as input the interpolated fields of monthly precipitation and temperature observations available in the CRU high-resolution surface climate data set CRU TS 2.1 (Mitchell and Jones, 2005). These span the period 1901-2002 and are on a resolution of 0.5° longitude by 0.5° latitude. These regional datasets have been superseded by the global land scPDSI on the same 0.5° grid (van der Schrier et al., 2013), calculated using a preliminary version of the CRU TS 3.23 high-resolution monthly climate data set (Harris et al., 2014). These have then been updated each year using newer versions of CRU TS input data, currently to the end of 2022 using a preliminary version of CRU TS 4.07.
For the European Alps region (van der Schrier et al., 2007), we have calculated the scPDSI values using as input the interpolated fields of monthly precipitation and temperature observations published by Efthymiadis et al. (2006). These span the period 1800-2003 and are on a resolution of 10 minutes longitude by 10 minute latitude.
Funding and support
These data sets and their associated papers were produced with funding from a variety of sources, especially UK NERC (under the Rapid Climate Change programme, grant NER/T/S/2002/00440) and NCAS (the NERC-funded National Centre for Atmospheric Science). Additional support for co-authors was provided by: the European Commission under the SO&P project (EVK2-CT-2002-00160) for Europe and North America; by the European Commission under the ALP-IMP project (EVK2-CT-2002-00148) for European Alps; by NOAA (NAO30AR4320179) for North America; by NERC (NE/G018863/1), European Commission (EURO4M, FP7/20072013-242093) and Chilean Government (CONICYT) for the original global version; by NERC (SMURPHS, NE/N006348/1) for the 2015 global update; and by (CR)2 Chile (CONICYT/FONDAP/15110009) and NERC (Belmont Forum/JPI-Climate INTEGRATE project, NE/P006809/1) for the 2016, 2017, 2018 and 2019 global updates; and by Chile FONDECYT (grant 1181956), UK NERC (GloSAT project NE/S015582/1) and UK NCAS for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 global updates.
Quick links : Global 0.5° 1901-2021 : Europe 5° 1750-2003 : Alps 10' 1800-2003
Latest version
Period | CRU TS version | README | Data | Size |
---|---|---|---|---|
1901-2022 | Preliminary 4.07 | README see note about the effect of limited data coverage | gzip'd netCDF file | 208 MB |
Previous versions
Period | CRU TS version | README | Data | Size |
---|---|---|---|---|
1901-2021 | Preliminary 4.06 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 204 MB |
1901-2020 | Preliminary 4.05 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 209 MB |
1901-2019 | Preliminary 4.04 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 203 MB |
1901-2018 | Preliminary 4.03 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 201 MB |
1901-2017 | Preliminary 3.26 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 202 MB |
1901-2016 | Preliminary 3.25 | README | gzip'd netCDF file gzip'd text file | 217 MB 3.6 GB |
1901-2015 | Preliminary 3.24 | README | gzip'd netCDF file | 194 MB |
(Click for larger image)
See Barichivich et al. (2022) for more details
(Click for larger image)
See Barichivich et al. (2022) for more details
These data have been superseded by the global 0.5°-resolution scPDSI
These data have been superseded by the global 0.5°-resolution scPDSI
These datasets are made available under the Open Database License. Any rights in individual contents of the datasets are licensed under the Database Contents License under the conditions of Attribution and Share-Alike.
Updated: September 2023, Ian Harris