Abstract
Abstract. Using 5520 observatories covering the whole territory of Spain (about 1 station per 90 km2 considering the whole period), a daily gridded maximum and minimum temperature was built covering a period from 1901 to 2014 in peninsular Spain and 1971 to 2014 in the Balearic and Canary Islands. A comprehensive quality control was applied to the original data, and the gaps were filled on each day and location independently. Using the filled data series, a grid of 5 km × 5 km spatial resolution was created by estimating daily temperatures and their corresponding uncertainties at each grid point. Four daily temperature indices were calculated to describe the spatial distribution of absolute maximum and minimum temperature, number of frost days and number of summer days in Spain. The southern plateau showed the maximum values of maximum absolute temperature and summer days, while the minimum absolute temperature and frost days reached their maximums at the northern plateau. The use of all the available information, the complete quality control and the high spatial resolution of the grid allowed for an accurate estimate of temperature that represents a precise spatial and temporal distribution of daily temperatures in Spain. The STEAD dataset is publicly available at https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/8622 and can be cited as Serrano-Notivoli et al. (2019).
Highlights
Despite a clear improvement over the last decades in meteorological measurement techniques, the inclusion of automated systems with near-real-time information submission or the increasing number of stations with a growing number of recorded variables, the existing climatic information is still unrepresentative in many territories
The deep quality control removed between 4.5 % and 5.6 % of the months and days considering the similarities between the observations and the estimates, with the number of removed data being slightly higher in minimum temperatures
We present a new high-resolution daily maximum and minimum temperature dataset for Spain (STEAD)
Summary
Despite a clear improvement over the last decades in meteorological measurement techniques, the inclusion of automated systems with near-real-time information submission or the increasing number of stations with a growing number of recorded variables, the existing climatic information is still unrepresentative in many territories. The low density of stations in isolated areas and the great variability in the number and location of observations over time represent a substantial problem. Despite these problems, or perhaps due to them, different teams dedicated a great deal of effort to creating reliable gridded climatic datasets covering large time periods. 2017) (Hansen et al, 2010) or BEST (1850–2017) (Rohde et al, 2013). In this regard, temperature has been widely studied in Spain, in terms of its spatio-temporal distribution (e.g. Peña-Angulo et al, 2016) and temporal trends Most of the existing works addressed coarse temporal scales or used individual stations for detailed regions (e.g. Villeta et al, 2018)
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