Dataset of gridded time series of monthly air temperature (min, max, mean) and atmospheric precipitation for Ukraine covering the period of 1946–2020

Abstract

In the paper, we present a dataset of long gridded time series of monthly minimum, maximum and mean air temperature and atmospheric precipitation for Ukraine (one of the largest European countries), covering the period of 1946–2020. The dataset was built through the thorough historical climate data processing, which included all mandatory steps: data rescue/digitization of missing values and/or periods in station time series from paper sources, their quality control (QC) and homogenization, and finally interpolation on 0.1o × 0.1o grid. The station data comprised monthly values of 178 stations for air temperature (for each of three parameters) and 224 stations for atmospheric precipitation. The quality assurance and homogenization were performed by means of the widely used homogenization software HOMER (HOMogEnization in R), while the well-known interpolation software MISH (Meteorological Interpolation based on Surface Homogenized data basis) was used to perform the gridding. The dataset has the potential to be used in a wide variety of applications, such as regional climate change and variability studies, assessment of other climate gridded products (e.g., reanalysis or analysis), global/regional climate model output verification, etc.