HadUK - Grid Climate Observations

The primary purpose of these data are to facilitate monitoring of UK climate and research into climate change, impacts and adaptation.

HadUK-Grid is a collection of gridded climate variables derived from the network of UK land surface observations. The data have been interpolated from meteorological station data onto a uniform grid to provide complete and consistent coverage across the UK. These data at 1 km resolution have been averaged across a set of discrete geographies defining UK countries consistent with data from UKCP18 climate projections. The dataset spans the period from 1836 to 2021, but the start time is dependent on climate variable and temporal resolution.

The gridded data are produced for daily, monthly, seasonal and annual timescales, as well as long term averages for a set of climatological reference periods. Variables include air temperature (maximum, minimum and mean), precipitation, sunshine, mean sea level pressure, wind speed, relative humidity, vapour pressure, days of snow lying, and days of ground frost.

This data set supersedes the previous versions of this dataset which also superseded UKCP09 gridded observations. Subsequent versions may be released in due course and will follow the version numbering as outlined by Hollis et al. (2018, see linked documentation).

The changes for v1.1.0.0 HadUK-Grid datasets are as follows:

* The addition of data for calendar year 2021

* The addition of 30 year averages for the new reference period 1991-2020

* An update to 30 year averages for 1961-1990 and 1981-2010. This is an order of operation change. In this version 30 year averages have been calculated from the underlying monthly/seasonal/annual grids (grid-then-average) in previous version they were grids of interpolated station average (average-then-grid). This order of operation change results in small differences to the values, but provides improved consistency with the monthly/seasonal/annual series grids. However this order of operation change means that 1961-1990 averages are not included for sfcWind or snowlying variables due to the start date for these variables being 1969 and 1971 respectively.

* A substantial new collection of monthly rainfall data have been added for the period before 1960. These data originate from the rainfall rescue project (Hawkins et al. 2022) and this source now accounts for 84% of pre-1960 monthly rainfall data, and the monthly rainfall series has been extended back to 1836.

Net changes to the input station data used to generate this dataset:

-Total of 122664065 observations

-118464870 (96.5%) unchanged

-4821 (0.004%) modified for this version

-4194374 (3.4%) added in this version

-5887 (0.005%) deleted from this version

The primary purpose of these data are to facilitate monitoring of UK climate and research into climate change, impacts and adaptation. The datasets 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 output from a number of data recovery activities relating to 19th and early 20th Century data have been used in the creation of this dataset, these activities were supported by: the Met Office Hadley Centre Climate Programme; the Natural Environment Research Council project "Analysis of historic drought and water scarcity in the UK"; the UK Research & Innovation (UKRI) Strategic Priorities Fund UK Climate Resilience programme; The UK Natural Environment Research Council (NERC) Public Engagement programme; the National Centre for Atmospheric Science; National Centre for Atmospheric Science and the NERC GloSAT project; and the contribution of many thousands of public volunteers. The dataset is provided under Open Government Licence.

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