NERC Data Catalogue Service
Standardised Precipitation Index time series for Integrated Hydrological Units Hydrometric Areas (1961-2012)
Standardised Precipitation Index (SPI) data for Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) Hydrometric Areas (Kral et al. [1]). SPI is a drought index based on the probability of precipitation for a given accumulation period as defined by McKee et al. [2]. SPI is calculated for different accumulation periods: 1, 3, 6, 12, 18, 24 months. Each of these is in turn 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 1961 to 2012. [1] Kral, F., Fry, M., Dixon, H. (2015). Integrated Hydrological Units of the United Kingdom: Hydrometric Areas without Coastline. NERC-Environmental Information Data Centre doi:10.5285/3a4e94fc-4c68-47eb-a217-adee2a6b02b3 [2] 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/10.5285/5e1792a0-ae95-4e77-bccd-2fb456112cc1
Simple
- Date (Publication)
- 2015-05-22
- Date (Creation)
- 2015-05-14
- Identifier
- CEH:EIDC: / 1431704829276
- Identifier
- doi: / 10.5285/5e1792a0-ae95-4e77-bccd-2fb456112cc1
- Other citation details
- Tanguy, M., Kral, F., Fry, M., Svensson, C., Hannaford, J. (2015). Standardised Precipitation Index time series for Integrated Hydrological Units Hydrometric Areas (1961-2012). NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/5e1792a0-ae95-4e77-bccd-2fb456112cc1
- Maintenance and update frequency
- notPlanned Not planned
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
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- Meteorological geographical features
- GEMET - Concepts, version 4.1.3
- Keywords
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- Hydrology
- Integrated Hydrological Units
- IHU
- SPI
- indicator
- rainfall extremes
- Access constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- Registration is required to access this data
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- Licence terms and conditions apply
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- If you reuse this data, you should cite: Tanguy, M., Kral, F., Fry, M., Svensson, C., Hannaford, J. (2015). Standardised Precipitation Index time series for Integrated Hydrological Units Hydrometric Areas (1961-2012). NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/5e1792a0-ae95-4e77-bccd-2fb456112cc1
- Spatial representation type
- textTable Text, table
- Metadata language
- EnglishEnglish
- Character set
- utf8 UTF8
- Topic category
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- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
- Begin date
- 1961-01-01
- End date
- 2012-12-31
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W
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- Unique resource identifier
- OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
- Distribution format
-
-
Comma-separated values (CSV)
()
-
Comma-separated values (CSV)
()
- 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 McKee et al. [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 Stagge et al. [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 (more details on the choice of methodology in Tanguy et al. [3]). To calculate SPI, the R package SCI was used (Gudmundsson & Stagge [4]), but modified to use L-moments (instead of Maximum Likelihood). The input data used is the monthly rainfall grids from CEH-Gridded Estimates of Areal Rainfall [CEH-GEAR] (Tanguy et al. [5], Keller et al. [6]) which has been area-averaged over each of the Integrated Hydrological Units (IHU) Hydrometric Areas (Kral et al. [7]). [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 [3] Tanguy et al. (2015), in preparation. [4] Gudmundsson, L. & Stagge, J. H. (2014). Package 'SCI': Standardized Climate Indices such as SPI, SRI or SPEI. Repository CRAN, http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/SCI/SCI.pdf [5] Tanguy, M., Dixon, H., Prosdocimi, I., Morris, D. G., Keller, V. D. J. (2014). Gridded estimates of daily and monthly areal rainfall for the United Kingdom (1890-2012) [CEH-GEAR]. NERC-Environmental Information Data Centre doi:10.5285/5dc179dc-f692-49ba-9326-a6893a503f6e [6] Keller,V. D. J., Tanguy, M. , Prosdocimi, I. , Terry, J. A. , Hitt, O., Cole, S. J. , Fry, M., Morris, D. G., Dixon, H. (2015) CEH-GEAR: 1km resolution daily and monthly areal rainfall estimates for the UK for hydrological use. Earth Syst. Sci. Data Discuss., 8, 83-112, www.earth-syst-sci-data-discuss.net/8/83/2015/ doi:10.5194/essdd-8-83-2015. [7] Kral, F., Fry, M., Dixon, H. (2015). Integrated Hydrological Units of the United Kingdom: Hydrometric Areas without Coastline. NERC-Environmental Information Data Centre doi:10.5285/3a4e94fc-4c68-47eb-a217-adee2a6b02b3
- File identifier
- 5e1792a0-ae95-4e77-bccd-2fb456112cc1 XML
- Metadata language
- EnglishEnglish
- Character set
- ISO/IEC 8859-1 (also known as Latin 1) 8859 Part 1
- Hierarchy level
- dataset Dataset
- Hierarchy level name
- dataset
- Date stamp
- 2026-02-06T14:13:56
- Metadata standard name
- UK GEMINI
- Metadata standard version
- 2.3
Point of contact
NERC EDS Environmental Information Data Centre
Lancaster Environment Centre, Library Avenue, Bailrigg
,
Lancaster
,
LA1 4AP
,
UK
https://eidc.ac.uk/
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