Robinson, E.L.; Blyth, E.M.; Clark, D.B.; Comyn-Platt, E.; Rudd, A.C.; Wiggins, M.

Climate hydrology and ecology research support system meteorology dataset for Great Britain (1961-2019) [CHESS-met]

https://doi.org/10.5285/835a50df-e74f-4bfb-b593-804fd61d5eab Cite this dataset

Gridded daily meteorological variables over Great Britain for the years 1961-2019 at 1 km resolution. This dataset contains time series of daily mean values of air temperature (K), specific humidity (kg kg-1), wind speed (m s-1), downward longwave radiation (W m-2), downward shortwave radiation (W m-2), precipitation (kg m-2 s-2) and air pressure (Pa), plus daily temperature range (K). These are the variables required to run the JULES land surface model with daily disaggregation.

The data are provided in gridded netCDF files. There is one file for each variable for each month of the dataset.

This research has been carried out under national capability funding as part of the NERC Hydro-JULES programme (NE/S017380/1) and under the NERC Changing Water Cycle program (NE/I006087/1).

Publication date: 2023-05-09

Format

NetCDF

Spatial information

Study area
Spatial representation type: Raster
Spatial reference system: OSGB 1936 / British National Grid

Temporal information

Temporal extent: 1961-01-01 to 2019-12-31

Provenance & quality

Input meteorological data

The data sources used for the meteorological variables are:

• Met Office Rainfall and Evaporation Calculation System (MORECS) dataset (Hough and Jones, 1997), specifically the daily mean values of air temperature, vapour pressure, hours of bright sunshine and wind speed.

• Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (1890-2019) [CEH-GEAR] for precipitation (https://doi.org/10.5285/dbf13dd5-90cd-457a-a986-f2f9dd97e93c).

• Climatic Research Unit (CRU) Time-Series TS 3.21, CRU TS 3.24, CRU TS 4.03, CRU TS 4.04 (Jones and Harris, 2013; Harris et al., 2014) daily temperature range.

• WATer and global CHange (WATCH) Forcing Data (Weedon et al., 2011) air pressure. 9https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/documents/8ebdd74c-ffec-4d5f-b832-e4916df694c8)

Other input data:

• The Integrated Hydrological Digital Terrain Model (IHDTM) (Morris and Flavin, 1990) 50m resolution elevation

• UK Energy Technology Support Unit (ETSU) 1 km resolution dataset of mean wind speeds. (Newton and Burch, 1985; Burch and Ravenscroft, 1992)

The MORECS variables were downscaled from 40 km to 1 km resolution by interpolating and adjusting for local topography using the IHDTM elevation and the ETSU wind speeds, then used to calculate the required Climate hydrology and ecology research support system (CHESS) variables. The Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (CEH-GEAR) precipitation was scaled to the appropriate units. The CRU TS daily temperature range was regridded from 0.5 degree to 1 km resolution with no interpolation, the monthly value is used for every day of the relevant month. A mean-monthly climatology of the WATCH Forcing Data air pressure was downscaled from 0.5 degree to 1 km resolution by adjusting for local topography, and the mean monthly value used for each day of the relevant month.

Services associated with this dataset

Modelled daily soil moisture and soil temperature at 1km resolution across the UK mainland, 1965-2018