Datasets/Regional Climatologies/Great Britain

Datasets/Regional Climatologies/Great Britain

This region is defined in terms of national grid references and extends from 8 to 66 easting and 1 to 125 northing with a spacing of 10km. These climatologies were constructed by E.Barrow during the period June to September 1993. The fields exist for TMP, TMX, TMN, PRE, RD0, VAP, REH, SUN, WND and FRS at three elevations LO, MN and HI. 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). The elevation data set was supplied by Simon Wright of the Environmental Information Centre at ITE Monks Wood. This 10km resolution data set was derived from 'A Land Characteristic Data Bank for Great Britain', generated by D.F. Ball, G.L. Radford and W.M. Williams at ITE, Bangor. It consists of square reference, mean altitude and lowest and highest spot heights/contours within each grid cell. Only land cells are included in the climatology files - a total of 2841 cells.

For this region monthly anomaly files for TMP and PRE have also been constructed covering the 30 years from 1961-1990. These anomalies derive from the long historical gridded global data sets of Hulme (precipitation) and Jones (temperature), but have not been re-centred to allow for interpolation errors.

The construction of this climatology has been fully described in Barrow et al. (1993) and the work has been funded by the Natural Environment Research Council through a TIGER IV sub-contract from the Environmental Change Unit at the University of Oxford. References:

Barrow,E.M., Hulme,M. and Jiang,T. (1993)
A 1961-90 baseline climatology and future climate change scenarios for Great Britain and Europe. Part I: 1961-90 Great Britain baseline climatology Climatic Research Unit, Norwich, 43pp. (plus maps).