Datasets/Regional Climatologies/The British Isles

Datasets/Regional Climatologies/The British Isles

This region is defined by 49° to 61°N and 9°W to 3°E with a resolution of 10'. These climatologies were constructed by E.Barrow during January to July 1994. At present fields exist for TMP, TMX, TMN, PRE, VAP, WND, RDG and DIU at a single elevation, MN. The raw station data which were used in the interpolation were obtained from the UK Met. Office through the Climate Impact LINK Project (Department of the Environment Contract PECD 7/12/96). Additional 1961-90 normals for Ireland and northern France were obtained from an equivalent European data set held by the Climatic Research Unit (see Hulme et al., 1995). The 10' latitude/longitude elevation data used were from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) elevation data set (FNOC, 1992). Modal cell elevation was used for those cells which had less than 50% coverage of water. All 5,184 cells in the region are currently held in the data files. The mean elevation climatologies for the above variables are present ly loaded in SPECTRE (see Barrow et al., 1994) and are available in the following directory:

These climatologies are currently being extended to cover the region 49° to 61°N and 11°W to 3°E at three elevations LO, MN and HI. The variables RD0, FRS and SNL will also be included.

This work was funded by MAFF under Contract Numbers CSA 1973 and CSA 2494.


References:
Barrow,E.M., Hulme,M. and Jiang,T. (1994)
SPECTRE: Software User Manual Climatic Research Unit, Norwich, 38pp.
FNOC (1992) FNOC/NCAR Global elevation, terrain and surface characteristics
Digital raster data on a 10-minute geographic (lat/long) 1080x2160 grid in, Global ecosystems database version 1.0: Disc A. Boulder, CO: NOAA National Geophysical Data Center. 10 independent single-attribute spatial layers on CD-ROM, 28MB
Hulme,M., Conway,D., Jones,P.D., Jiang,T., Barrow,E.M. and Turney,C. (1995)
Construction of a 1961-90 European climatology for climate modelling and impacts applications Int. J. Climatol., 13, 1333-63.