NERC Data Catalogue Service
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
Default
Identification info
- Metadata Language
- English (en)
- Character set
- utf8
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 2017-10-11
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 2017-07-11
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 2017-10-06
- 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
- Maintenance and update frequency
- notPlanned
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0 ()
-
- Meteorological geographical features
- GEMET - Concepts, version 4.1.3
- GeoNames
- Keywords
-
- Drought Inventory
- Drought Catalogue
- Drought Indicator
- SPI
- Standardised Precipitation Index
- Rainfall extremes
- Limitations on Public Access
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- Registration is required to access this data
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions
- Other constraints
- Licence terms and conditions apply
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions
- 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
- Distance
- 5000 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
- Topic category
-
- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
N
S
E
W
))
- Begin date
- 1862-01-01
- End date
- 2015-12-31
Distribution Information
- Data format
-
-
NetCDF
(
4
)
-
NetCDF
(
4
)
- Resource Locator
-
Download the data
Download a copy of this data
- Resource Locator
-
Supporting information
Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset
- Resource Locator
-
Download the data
Download a copy of this data
- Resource Locator
-
Supporting information
Supporting information available to assist in re-use of this dataset
- Quality Scope
- dataset
- Other
- dataset
Report
- Dataset Reference Date ()
- 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
Metadata
- File identifier
- 233090b2-1d14-4eb9-9f9c-3923ea2350ff XML
- Metadata Language
- English (en)
- Character set
- ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1)
- Resource type
- dataset
- Hierarchy level name
- dataset
- Metadata Date
- 2023-11-09T12:35:36
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
- 2.3
Environmental Information Data Centre
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