Mexico's High Resolution Climate Database (MexHiResClimDB): a new daily high-resolution gridded climate dataset for Mexico covering 1951–2020

Abstract. This work presents Mexico's High Resolution Climate Database (MexHiResClimDB), which is a newly developed gridded, high-resolution climate dataset comprised of daily, monthly and yearly precipitation and temperature (T_min, T_max, T_avg). This new database provides the largest temporal coverage of the aforementioned climate variables at the highest spatial resolution (20 arc sec, or 560 m on Mexico's CCL projection) when compared to the other currently available gridded datasets for Mexico and its development has allowed to analyze the country's climate extremes for the 1951–2020 period. By comparing the spatial distribution of precipitation from the MexHiResClimDB with other gridded data (Daymet, L15, CHIRPS and PERSIANN CDR), it was found that the precipitation provided by this new dataset is the only one that adequately represents the spatial variation of extreme precipitation events, in particular for the precipitation that occurred during September 15–16 of 2013, caused by the presence of Tropical storm Manuel in the Pacific Ocean and Hurricane Ingrid (Cat 1) in the Gulf of Mexico. With this new database it was possible to summarize extreme events of precipitation and temperature in Mexico for the 1951–2020 period — a summary that was not available before: the wettest year was 1958, the wettest day 1970-09-26, and September of 2013 the wettest month. It was also found that eight out of the ten days with the highest T_min occurred in 2020, the two months with the highest T_min were July and August of 2020 and that the six years with the highest T_min were 2015–2020. When T_max was analyzed, it was found that the hottest day was 1998-06-15, while June of 1998 was the hottest month and 2020 the hottest year, and that the four hottest years occurred between 2011–2020. Nationwide (and considering 1961–1990 as the baseline period), T_min, T_avg and T_max have increased, with their anomalies drastically increasing in recent years and reaching values above 1.0 ^oC in 2020. At the same time, precipitation has also decreased in recent years — which combined with the increase in temperature will have severe impacts on water availability that need to be analyzed in detail, for example at the watershed level. This new database provides a tool to quantify — in detail — the spatio-temporal variability of climate throughout Mexico.

The MexHiResClimDB entire dataset is available on Figshare (DOI:10.6084/m9.figshare.c.7689428, Carrera-Hernández (2025a)).