HadUK-Grid version v1.0.2.1 released including data for 2019

In 2019 the CEDA Archive published a valuable and popular HadUK-Grid dataset collection. This collection, provided by the Met Office contains gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations,  particularly notable  in that it spans a long time-series. Over the last few months the Met Office have been preparing the latest release of the HadUK-Grid data covering 1862-2019 and has now been made freely available to download from the CEDA Archive service.

Some of the observations underwent a ‘rescue mission’ where they were digitised from historic weather station records. These observations have been collated to generate values on a regular grid from the irregular station network, taking into account factors such as latitude and longitude, altitude and terrain shape, coastal influence, and urban land use. Variables include air temperature, precipitation, sunshine duration, mean sea level pressure, wind speed, relative humidity, vapour pressure, days of snow lying, and days of ground frost.

The density of the station network used varies through time, and for different climate variables — for example, for the temperature variables the number of stations rises from about 270 in the 1910s to 600 in the mid-1990s, before falling to 450 in 2006. The station observations used to produce the grids have undergone a quality control process which corrects or removes erroneous data. The gridded data sets are based on the archive of UK weather observations held at the Met Office.

Details of the particular improvements in v1.0.2.1 over previous versions are available on the assocaited CEDA data catalogue records and within summary change log files now available in the archive alongside the data.

The primary purpose of these data are to facilitate monitoring of UK climate and research into climate change, impacts and adaptation. Data can be accessed here and more information can be found on the Met Office website. More information about why these data are of particular use is available on the original news item when these data were first release in 2018. 

The data have been created by the Met Office with financial support from the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS) and Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) in order to support the Public Weather Service Customer Group (PWSCG), the Hadley Centre Climate Programme, and the UK Climate Projections (UKCP18) project. The data recovery activity to supplement 19th and early 20th Century data availability was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council (NERC grant ref: NE/L01016X/1) project “Analysis of historic drought and water scarcity in the UK”.