Preprints
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-63
https://doi.org/10.5194/essd-2023-63
02 Mar 2023
 | 02 Mar 2023
Status: this preprint is currently under review for the journal ESSD.

MOPREDAScentury: a long-term monthly precipitation grid for the Spanish mainland

Santiago Beguería, Dhais Peña-Angulo, Víctor Trullenque-Blanco, and Carlos González-Hidalgo

Abstract. This article describes the development of a monthly precipitation dataset for the Spanish mainland (western Mediterranean basin), covering the period between December 1915 and December 2020. The dataset combines ground observational data from the National Climate Data Bank (NCDB) of the Spanish national climate and weather service (AEMET) and new data rescued from meteorological yearbooks published prior to 1951 that was never incorporated into the NCDB. The yearbooks data represented a significant improvement of the dataset, as it almost doubled the number of weather stations available during the first decades of the 20th century, the period when the dataset was more scarce. The final dataset contains records from 11,312 stations, although the number of stations with data in a given month varies largely between 674 in 1939 and a maximum of 5,234 in 1975. Spatial interpolation was used on the resulting dataset to create monthly precipitation grids. The process involved a two-stage process: estimation of the probability of zero-precipitation (dry month), and estimation of precipitation magnitude. Interpolation was carried out using universal kriging, using anomalies (ratios with respect to the 1961–2000 monthly climatology) as dependent variable and several geographic variates as independent variables. Cross-validation results showed that the resulting grids are spatially and temporally unbiased, although the mean error and the variance deflation effect are highest during the first decades of the 20th century, when the observational dataset was more scarce. The dataset is available at https://doi.org/10.20350/digitalCSIC/15136 under an open license, and can be cited as Beguería et al. (2023).

Santiago Beguería et al.

Status: open (until 27 Apr 2023)

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  • CC1: 'Comment on essd-2023-63', Sixto Herrera, 17 Mar 2023 reply
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Santiago Beguería et al.

Data sets

MOPREDAScentury: a long-term monthly precipitation grid for the Spanish mainland Santiago Beguería, Dhais Peña-Angulo, Víctor Trullenque-Blanco, and Carlos González-Hidalgo http://hdl.handle.net/10261/291131

Santiago Beguería et al.

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Short summary
A gridded data set on monthly precipitation over mainland Spain between spanning 1916–2020. The dataset combines ground observations from the Spanish National Climate Data Bank and new data rescued from meteorological yearbooks published prior to 1951 which almost doubled the number of weather stations available during the first decades of the 20th century. Geostatistical techniques were used to interpolate a regular 10x10 km grid.