Documentation
This page contains the documentation for the CRU CL 1.0 data-set, and comprises:
Ownership
This data-set is owned by its author, Mark New. It is being distributed, where necessary, by Tim Mitchell.
Data
The CRU CL 1.0 data-set is available below.
Full range of data-sets
If you have arrived at this page from a different website (without the red frame), you may be interested in the wider range of high-resolution climate grids available here. There is a table detailing the full range of data-sets.).
8th October 2003
Data-set supply transferred from David Viner to Tim Mitchell. The only means of supply is now via download through a web browser.
Introduction
This data-set was subsequently augmented by a similar data-set with the higher spatial resolution of ten minutes (CRU CL 2.0).
The CRU CL 1.0 data-set comprises monthly grids of observed mean climate from 1961-1990, and covering the global land surface at 0.5 degree resolution. There are nine climatic variables available: diurnal temperature range, minimum temperature, maximum temperature, precipitation, mean temperature, wet-day frequency, frost-day frequency, vapour pressure, cloud cover, radiation, and wind-speed.
Guidance
This data-set was constructed by Mark New. Users should refer to the published literature for details of it.
Data Structure
Data Summary
For further details about the formatting of the summary files below, see the text file, which gives the file format and a short snippet of fortran 90 code.
Variable 1961-1990 Mean temperature Diurnal temperature range Maximum temperature Minimum temperature Precipitation Wet days Vapour pressure Cloud Radiation Frost days Wind speed Ownership
New, M., Hulme, M. and Jones, P.D., 1999: Representing twentieth century space-time climate variability. Part 1: development of a 1961-90 mean monthly terrestrial climatology. Journal of Climate 12, 829-856 (abstract)
Disclaimer
The data-set is only available in the form of a set of ASCII files, accessible below.
units
tmp
°C * 10
dtr
°C * 10
tmx
°C * 10
tmn
°C * 10
pre
(mm/day) * 10
wet
days * 10
vap
hPa * 10
cld
percentage
rad
watts per square metre
frs
days * 10
wnd
(metres per second) * 10
The creator of this data
set (Dr. Mark New) retains full ownership rights over it. The data set may
be freely used for non-commerical scientific and educational purposes, provided
it is described as CRU CL 1.0 and attributed to:
The author of this data-set cannot bear any responsibility for the consequences of using it, which are entirely the responsibility of the user. It is inevitable that a data-set of this size will contain some errors and inconsistencies. However, these have been kept to a minimum and when they are identified they are corrected when resources permit. Updates to this data-set will be notified on this web page and by email to registered users.