NERC Data Catalogue Service
Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]
1km and 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. (1993). 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. Full details about this dataset can be found at
https://doi.org/10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0
Simple
- Date (Publication)
- 2015-04-30
- Identifier
- CEH:EIDC: / 1428490171842
- Identifier
- doi: / 10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0
- Other citation details
- Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Barker, L., Svensson, C., Kral, F., Fry, M. (2015). Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre 10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0
- Maintenance and update frequency
- notPlanned Not planned
- GEMET - INSPIRE themes, version 1.0
-
- Meteorological geographical features
- Access constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- Registration is required to access this data
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- License terms and conditions apply
- Use constraints
- otherRestrictions Other restrictions
- Other constraints
- If you reuse this data, you should cite: Tanguy, M., Hannaford, J., Barker, L., Svensson, C., Kral, F., Fry, M. (2015). Gridded Standardized Precipitation Index (SPI) using gamma distribution with standard period 1961-2010 for Great Britain [SPIgamma61-10]. NERC Environmental Information Data Centre https://doi.org/10.5285/94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0
- Spatial representation type
- grid Grid
- Distance
- 1000 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
- Distance
- 5000 urn:ogc:def:uom:EPSG::9001
- Metadata language
- EnglishEnglish
- Character set
- utf8 UTF8
- Topic category
-
- Climatology, meteorology, atmosphere
- Begin date
- 1961-01-01
- End date
- 2012-12-31
N
S
E
W
))
- Unique resource identifier
- OSGB 1936 / British National Grid
- Distribution format
-
-
netCDF
(
4
)
-
netCDF
(
4
)
- 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 (more details on the choice of methodology in [3]). To calculate SPI, the R package SCI was used [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] ([5], [6]) [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.
- File identifier
- 94c9eaa3-a178-4de4-8905-dbfab03b69a0 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
- 2025-06-03T07:43:43
- 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/
Overviews
Spatial extent
N
S
E
W
Provided by
Associated resources
Not available