Current climate data

Current Climate Data

Of the many sources of current climate data, the foremost include the Climate Research Unit (www.cru.uea. ac.uk) at the University of East Anglia, UK;  WorldClim (www.worldclim.org) at Berkeley, California,  and Climate Explorer (www.climexp.knmi.nl) and the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute. The first two focus on Global data, the latter on Europe. Edenext has focussed on processing the Worldclim layers, but will access and extract data from the other sources on request.

Perhaps the most widely known of these is Worldclim which provides a set of global climate layers (climate grids) data as monthly temperature and rainfall for 1950-2000 with a maximum spatial resolution of a square kilometre. They can be used for mapping and spatial modelling in a GIS or other computer program. . After removing stations with errors, the Worldclim database consists of precipitation records from 47,554 locations, mean temperature from 24,542 locations, and minimum and maximum temperature for 14,835 locations. This scheme follows that of ANUCLIM, except that for temperature seasonality the standard deviation was used because a coefficient of variation does not make sense with temperatures between -1 and 1).

The Worldclim datasets are fully described in: Hijmans, R.J., S.E. Cameron, J.L. Parra, P.G. Jones and A. Jarvis, 2005. Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. International Journal of Climatology 25: 1965-1978 Click here to link to the pdf.  
Three sets of data have been provided by EDENext DMT:

  1. Current 20km (10 minute) CRU (Climate Research Unit).  This older dataset has remained as it still provides some unique climate variables not widely available elsewhere, albeit at a coarser scale.  Variables available include precipitation, mean temperature, temperature range, wind speed, relative humidity, wet days, frost days and monthly sunshine hours.
  2. Current WorldClim 1km (30 second) resolution for the EDENext mask coverage for baseline conditions (1950-2000). Data were downloaded in native ascii image format, and converted to ERDAS .img which can be used directly in ArcGIS 9.2 and above. Units are degrees*10 for temperature and mm*10 for precipitation. Projection is geographic. . The basic parameters are mean, minimum and maximum monthly temperatures, monthly precipitation
  3. Current BiOCLIM 1km (30 second) WorldClim bioclimatic indicators. The bioclimatic indicators are as follows.
  • BIO1 = Annual Mean Temperature
  • BIO2 = Mean Diurnal Range (Mean of monthly (max temp - min temp))
  • BIO3 = Isothermality (BIO2/BIO7) (* 100)
  • BIO4 = Temperature Seasonality (standard deviation *100)
  • BIO5 = Max Temperature of Warmest Month
  • BIO6 = Min Temperature of Coldest Month
  • BIO7 = Temperature Annual Range (BIO5-BIO6)
  • BIO8 = Mean Temperature of Wettest Quarter
  • BIO9 = Mean Temperature of Driest Quarter
  • BIO10 = Mean Temperature of Warmest Quarter
  • BIO11 = Mean Temperature of Coldest Quarter
  • BIO12 = Annual Precipitation
  • BIO13 = Precipitation of Wettest Month
  • BIO14 = Precipitation of Driest Month
  • BIO15 = Precipitation Seasonality (Coefficient of Variation)
  • BIO16 = Precipitation of Wettest Quarter
  • BIO17 = Precipitation of Driest Quarter
  • BIO18 = Precipitation of Warmest Quarter
  • BIO19 = Precipitation of Coldest Quarter

Return to climate data home or:

  1. Details on current climate data available on EDENextData.com
  2. Details on projected future climate data available on EDENextData.com
  3. A table outlining file naming conventions for climate data files on EDENextData.com