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  Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010) v4

5km gridded Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) data for Great Britain, which is a drought index based on the probability of precipitation for a given accumulation period as defined by McKee et al [1]. There are seven accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 9, 12, 18, 24 months and for each period SPI is calculated for each of the twelve calendar months. Note that values in monthly (and for longer accumulation periods also annual) time series of the data therefore are likely to be autocorrelated. The standard period which was used to fit the gamma distribution is 1961-2010. The dataset covers the period from 1862 to 2015.

This version supersedes previous versions (version 2 and 3) of the same dataset due to minor errors in the data files.

NOTE: the difference between this dataset with the previously published dataset "Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]" (Tanguy et al., 2015; https://doi.org/10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0 ) , apart from the temporal and spatial extent, is the underlying rainfall data from which SPI was calculated. In the previously published dataset, CEH-GEAR (Tanguy et al., 2014; https://doi.org/10.5285/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e ) was used, whereas in this new version, Met Office 5km rainfall grids were used (see supporting information for more details). The methodology to calculate SPI is the same in the two datasets.

[1] McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., Kleist, J. (1993). The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales. Eighth Conference on Applied Climatology, 17-22 January 1993, Anaheim, California.

Full details about this dataset can be found at https://doi.org/10.5285/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff

 
Citation proposal
Tanguy, M. (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) - Fry, M. (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) - Svensson, C. (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) - Hannaford, J. (Centre for Ecology & Hydrology) - Environmental Information Data Centre (2017) . Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010) v4. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://data-search.nerc.ac.uk:443/geonetwork/srv/api/records/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff
 

Simple

Date ( Publication )
2017-10-11
Date ( Creation )
2017-07-11
Date ( Revision )
2017-10-06
Identifier
https://catalogue.ceh.ac.uk/id/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff
Identifier
doi: / 10.5285/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff
Other citation details
Tanguy, M., Fry, M., Svensson, C., Hannaford, J. (2017). Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010) v4. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff

  Point of contact

UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Maliko Tanguy  

  Author

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Tanguy, M.  

  Author

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Fry, M.  

  Author

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Svensson, C.  

  Author

Centre for Ecology & Hydrology - Hannaford, J.  

  Custodian

Environmental Information Data Centre  

  Publisher

NERC Environmental Information Data Centre  

Maintenance and update frequency
notPlanned Not planned
GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ( Theme )
  • Meteorological geographical features
GeoNames
  • United Kingdom
Keywords
  • Historic Droughts , Drought , Water Scarcity , Drought Inventory , Drought Catalogue , Drought Indicator , SPI , Standardised Precipitation Index , Rainfall extremes
Access constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Use constraints
otherRestrictions Other restrictions
Other constraints
If you reuse this data, you should cite: Tanguy, M., Fry, M., Svensson, C., Hannaford, J. (2017). Historic Gridded Standardised Precipitation Index for the United Kingdom 1862-2015 (generated using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010) v4. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff
Spatial representation type
grid Grid
Distance
5000  urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
Metadata language
English English
Character set
utf8 UTF8
Topic category
  • Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
N
S
E
W


Distribution format
  • NetCDF (4 )

  Distributor

Environmental Information Data Centre  

OnLine resource
Download the data  

Download a copy of this data

OnLine resource
Supporting information  

Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset

Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Other
dataset

Conformance result

Date ( Publication )
2010-12-08
Statement

SPI is calculated as originally defined in [1]. SPI is based on the cumulative probability of a given rainfall amount occurring at a location. The historic rainfall data of the station is fitted to a statistical distribution. For this dataset, the statistical distribution used is the gamma distribution, which has been extensively used and is recommended as a default choice for Europe by [2]. The L-moments method was used to estimate the gamma distribution parameters, as the maximum likehood method was failing to fit a realistic distribution in some isolated cases. To calculate SPI, the R package SCI was used, but modified to use L-moments (instead of Maximum Likelihood). The input data used is the monthly rainfall grids from the Met Office 5km gridded rainfall product. In this version of the dataset (version 4), the monthly rainfall grids from 1960 to 2000 was derived from the Met Office 5-km daily rainfall grids, to address some localised issues that were found in the Met Office monthly rainfall grids.

[1] McKee, T. B., Doesken, N. J., Kleist, J. (1993). The Relationship of Drought Frequency and Duration to Time Scales. Eighth Conference on Applied Climatology, 17-22 January 1993, Anaheim, California.

[2] Stagge, J. H., Tallaksen, L. M., Gudmundsson, L., Van Loon, A. F. and Stahl, K. (2015), Candidate Distributions for Climatological Drought Indices (SPI and SPEI). Int. J. Climatol. doi: 10.1002/joc.4267

gmd:MD_Metadata

File identifier
233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff   XML
Metadata language
English English
Character set
ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1) 8859 Part 1
Hierarchy level
dataset Dataset
Hierarchy level name
dataset
Date stamp
2020-03-13T14:19:45
Metadata standard version
2.3

  Point of contact

Environmental Information Data Centre  
Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg Lancaster LA1 4AP UK

 
 

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233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff   Access to the portal Read here the full details and access to the data.

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